Skip to main content

Bedford utilises Qroutes software to boost transport efficiency

Bedford Borough Council has used Qroutes' route planning software to reorganise the home to school transport network. The solution Is said to have saved over £200,000 ($140,000) a year in transport costs and has helped plan transport for 3,000 school children. Additionally, Bedford has used the cloud-based service to plan transport 700 special educational needs and 1000 social care users. The council manages a fleet of approximately 50 in-house vehicles which mainly transport the most vulnerable people.
April 16, 2018 Read time: 2 mins

Bedford Borough Council has used 8661 Qroutes' route planning software to reorganise the home to school transport network. The solution Is said to have saved over £200,000 ($140,000) a year in transport costs and has helped plan transport for 3,000 school children.

Additionally, Bedford has used the cloud-based service to plan transport 700 special educational needs and 1000 social care users. The council manages a fleet of approximately 50 in-house vehicles which mainly transport the most vulnerable people.

The product is also said to have helped the council remove eight buses from the network through improved vehicle utilisation.

Chris Pettifer, chief officer for transport, Bedford Borough Council, said: “With council budget restrictions and policy changes we knew we had to review the council’s client transport network significantly. We needed software that could support this process of the best routes and vehicle suitability in view of all the complexities of school, special needs and social care transport. Over the years we have tried different systems but none really delivered what we needed and were also costly. Qroutes has conversely been fantastic in providing an easy to use interface that cannot only re-plan our network in minutes but was also available as an affordable solution over the web.”

“It used to take days or weeks to re-plan routes, but with Qroutes we can run a new plan for 3,000 school bus children literally in minutes. We manually intervene sometimes as some individual requirements can be very unusual, but the system saves a lot of time and we can run different ‘what if’ scenarios to work out the best options”, added Pettifer.

Qroutes is available as a Software as a Service subscription. Subscribers have access to new functionality as releases come online, without having to update versions locally.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Electronic toll collection: Change is in the air
    November 7, 2024
    Trends in technology plus users’ comfort in adopting new advances indicate that the environment for a new electronic toll collection architecture is evolving. Hal Worrall considers what this might look like
  • Go Denver opens up a world of seamless mobility and better data-driven decisions
    June 5, 2017
    Denver’s pioneering Go Denver mobility-as-a-service app has attracted 7,000 users in a matter of months. Geoff Hadwick heard how at ITS International’s recent conference. If Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is ever going to work, it needs to have “one universal platform everywhere” according to Sean Mackin, former manager of parking and mobility services at the Denver transportation and mobility department and now Colorado branch manager for ABM Parking & Transportation. Speaking at the recent MaaS Market confe
  • DG MOVE’s Christos Economou on the EU’s vision for road transport
    July 26, 2013
    Christos Economou, Deputy Head of Unit dealing with land transport within the European Commission’s DG MOVE, describes a new framework for road charging in Europe to Jason Barnes. Within the European Union (EU), two Directives shape the legislative framework on road charging. Directive 1999/62/EC sets up a number of rules to make sure that national road charging schemes do not distort competition on the internal market or discriminate between hauliers. It is misleadingly called ‘Eurovignette’ after the comm
  • Cost of global road deaths & injuries: $3.6 trillion a year, says iRAP
    August 16, 2024
    Latest annual Safety Insights Explorer report reveals scale of human and financial burden