Demand Responsive Transport - Buses With No Timetables

camera rolling in focus bright sunny day lovely go for it good morning i've got the train this morning down to seven oaks however my journey my adventure today will not be on trains it will instead be on buses this is a rather colorful yellow and purple leaflet from go to seven oaks they're a bus company uh in seven oaks that are running what's called just checking on my phone it's called a drt a demand responsive transport bus service that is to say they've stripped out all the regularity of running route numbers set to regular routes at regular times so you can just book a bus to turn up on demand and take you to wherever it is you want to go let's try it out [Music] so i'm sat in the main bus station at seven oaks bus stops b c and d are still in use by go to but what's strange is that there's no timetable saying bus number x is here at 10 minutes past that doesn't happen anymore instead they have a fleet of buses about 40 opt out on the road which literally pick you up on demand on response and take you to where you want to go to do that you have an app on your phone it's a bit like uber but with some differences we'll talk about that later you can also ring up and make a booking by telephone if you don't want to use an app so i'm going to try it now i'm going to confirm my current location you confirm where you are and then i want to go uh we'll get a bit of a training in i want to go and see apparently they've refurbished baton ball station which is about 10 minutes away and then you confirm that and then it has a little thing and there you go it tells you and i say yes to confirm that a bus is on its way to come and get me and just magically take me there the software being used here comes from the company viavan who are powering demand responsive shared right systems in various locations in the uk as well as around the world they say they offer convenient affordable and eco-friendly trips in places which may be difficult to otherwise serve with traditional public transport being picked up at 7x bus station it gives you the plate number the registration the license plate of the bus my driver's name is andrew and it'll be here in three minutes pulling into the bus station now so this should be my bus [Music] hello are you andrew you take me to baton ball i know that i'm not the only person on the bus there are three others on board who are either dropping off along the way or after i've got off at baton ball so i'm on the bus uh the app is now telling me it's uh showing me the exact route that the bus is going to take and an eta of 11 17 which is in eight minutes time and they're going to go to baton ball um i mentioned earlier it's a bit like an uber taxi booking the interface is a bit like that but it's different because uh via van who are the american company that write the software basically the main difference is there's a clever algorithm in it it knows where all the buses are the software then analyzes all the journeys that people are requesting to take and it will root one bus to pick up multiple people on the way so the app is informing me ah this is a regular bus stop there's somebody else on this bus and the person's getting off there was a drop-off happening and that drop-off is now happening so don't think of it as like a you know an a to b point-to-point one-way taxi journey you've got to remember it's a responsive bus journey where anybody can get on at a bus stop or any but multiple people can get on or off during the journey thank you very much yes that's my friendly bus driver it's so weird look so on the front it says pre-booked only so i've come to baton ball station vicki and i came here 217 just before all the stations and during all the stations to do like a q a in baton bought they've done it up there's a new cafe and community area it looks lovely i think i might really test the app the bus app by going to another station that's in the area that's hildenborough and i know where it can go to because in the leaflet here there's a map but it's also on the phone too when you're in the app you can see the area that it covers it's about 20 miles north south goes all the way up beyond swanley and then down to tunbridge and eden bridge and out west to western about 10 miles from side to side so it does cover a large area not just in seven oaks but in the surrounding seven oaks area as well so i will book another trip on the app and what i'm really interested in knowing is that when i started this morning i was at the bus station here there's no bus stop here so i'm assuming the app's gonna say like walk two minutes to the nearest bus stop and we'll see what happens and we'll go to hildenbar so yeah remember it doesn't pick you up exactly where you are you still have to go to a bus stop so the app is saying to me just walk 10 minutes around the corner to the bus stop by seven oaks hospital so i know that a bus personally which i love is coming to get me so i'm at the bus stop and sure enough down here the new way to travel in seven oaks download the go to app like it here's my bus it's chris it's great yeah look at the bottle to myself uh at the moment at the moment uh turn the pick up around the corner so we've gotta pick up around the corner who's taking me to hillenborough uh yeah i've got the other person to drop off first and then we're going to heal the booth love it thank you sir [Music] so i am currently the only person on the bus but my driver informs me that we are picking up someone around the corner it was interesting to see i was watching the bus come in on the app and it took a slightly different route uh after about a minute to obviously either pick up or drop off somebody else but you can see it you can see it changing i settled in for my pleasant journey down to hildenbar reading up on more of the details of how it works and as i got off my driver then explained how he liked it as it meant you could offer more services to places that may otherwise only see a small number of buses per week hey so i would like to see this service as a driver and talking to passengers that this service reconnects lots of rural villages that might not necessarily have a buster by service at the moment or they have one bus a day one a week whereas at least now we could potentially offer a demand service so if you need us we can come out we can get you take your shopping and i think i can see that being the future as a driver i just wanted to come back uh again a bit like bad and ball and we came here pre-order stations during all the stations i remember changing here me and vicki spent half an hour waiting for a train change at hillsborough i'm gonna sit on the platforms have my lunch that's in my bag and then order a bus to take me back to seven oaks again and i'm back at seven oak central bus station uh back where i started this morning it's just fine somewhere less noisy and it's a little bit quieter here now i've had my app out this whole time and we mentioned the phone number earlier and we'll talk about money and paying because two things there are some people who maybe don't have a smartphone or don't want to use an app those are the ones that can call up speak to a human and book a bus just by calling a phone number they're saying at the moment take up is about half and half it's a 50 50 split on those that use the phone number and those that use the app the other great thing that these guys here are doing is that they're accepting cash payments as an option when you sign up to either give them your credit card details so that you can then just touch and you pay and it pays as you go but if you want to be traditionalist and pay with money in cash you can choose the cash option when you sign up and the driver when they arrive they know who you are and who they're picking up and it also says they need to pay by cash so if cash is your thing and you want to pay your 2 pound 20 or whatever it is by cash you can do that here in seven oaks whilst i'm here at the bus station it would be remiss of me not to mention this is the lovely phil hello phil hi good afternoon when you ring the number the phone either goes gets directed through to the decker we're gonna go to the depth in a bit or it comes through to here are you calling this like the travel information shop the travel shop troubleshoot and phil's here phil you can book a journey for somebody here can you not absolutely how does it work it's very easy uh put an id number in for example i'll put mine in um here we go simply a case of where do you want to be picked up well we'll say 7x bus station where do you want to go i'm going to go home to braced it so i'll click that i click a little button here that says get proposals and it will tell me how long before the first bus is available now this is in two minutes so if i click on that and i can then book the ride just to test that it worked and for fun i then stood outside and rang phil inside and booked my next bus journey standee standing okay thank you very much great customer service i sounded like you had a really pleasant customer on the phone jasmine yes a gentleman called jeff jeff marshall he sounds great he was it was um it was a very interesting job [Music] i'm gonna go to tesco i'm imagining i'm doing my shopping uh i'm gonna go to the depot andrew thank you cheers made it to tesco it's because there's a costa coffee here all right i've got my shopping in other words i've had a coffee and used the toilet i just booked a bus it's going to be here in seven minutes we're gonna go to vestry road bestie road is the depot by now i'd really got into the swing of just booking a bus on demand and it was great again to see on the app exactly where it was before it arrived one minute away should be here any second a driver is sand [Music] is this the mercedes so all the buses on goes fleet are the opti minivans but this is the only one little mercedes is that right two of them i thought there was one okay two two how many does this hold so there's two of these and i am the only person on board i kind of want to have the experience again of having another passenger get on or or get off because i quite like that it's kind of interesting to see it stop and someone else get on on demand i'm still getting my head around the fact that it's truly on demand but it works it does work so this is the depo that's fine yeah just drop me right there thank you thank you at the depot i've jumped on board one of their few double deckers it's an enviro 400. if you like spotting your glasses i'm climbing up the stairs because there's a man here that we wanted to talk to all day there he is he's called a handy wells hello good afternoon you're the general manager i am i got some questions for you how do you how do you feel like it's it's working and do you think your entire bus fleet is gonna work like this or how might you sort of change routes in the future i certainly see the future with demand and response in it um it's got to work alongside fixed line routes for sure one thing that i get asked a lot to when i go to public meetings is why can't a bus do this at this time well this is the public's opportunity instead of me writing their timetable they get to tell me when and where they want the bus so today i've concentrated just my efforts and my travel within seven hours you do have some fixed routes outside of seven oaks do you think you might ever have some fixed routes again in surface seminars i guess what i'm trying to say is surely you're gonna look at how how it works and maybe you're you're happy to adapt over time yes um there will certainly be a time on a place where fixed line comes back um we're already bringing back routes one two five and six uh mid august to complement the go-to uh work that we're doing in and around town uh and it's what i know do you know how like intelligent or adaptive the system is i'll give you an example i used to work in for a large company where the lifts were controlled by software and the software behind the lifts were intelligent enough to know that like at say one o'clock people going to lunch there'd always be like a rush of passengers passengers you know elevator people you know sort of getting on at the sixth floor yeah and going down to the second floor where the canteen is so over time does the software kind of go ah on thursdays at 10 a.m there's always an influx of people going to or from the tesco for example the the data we get back from the via van software has meant we've been able to react to the flows of passengers very very quickly uh amending driving duties uh amending the terminals that we use to keep the buses when they're uh when they're not being used excuse me i need to get a bus back to uh seven lake station do you know where i can know where i can get one could i just drive this one could you drive this one i could try this you've got a license all right i have you could drive me to seven lakes station i'm just about to leave when two things happen one i realized that i mean like the main recording at the maintenance depot and then this lovely chap here this is austin you're the owner he's like this is the top the top man what take i know it's obvious austin what happens in this room what takes place in this room what goes on here we maintain our fleet of 50-ish buses here every five weeks they have a full inspection and all the work is done on them uh these this one here that's up in here at the moment is having a quality check ready for its mot next week and his friend next door is going to be next in line for such things you're actually quite hands on yourself you've got some tools in your hand you are an engineer by trade so you know how to fix a bus right yeah i'm well engineer is what i do i never really went out to be an operator but so i still run the workshop i do all the quality checks and it makes sure that we run our buses in great condition you tap the nuts and bobs to make sure they're not loose or so there's playing anything or we're looking at gators there see if they're split so this is real this is what we do our first time pass rate is 100 so 100 of our buckets past their mot first time and we need to make sure that we maintain that austin has an enthusiastic driving force at the company which alongside and his commitment to making it work is bringing a fascinating new way to travel by bus in seven oaks and i thoroughly enjoyed my day and using this service for the final closing shot i said is it okay to put my camera on on this and this is i get my phone now this is an axle stand that will take seven tons apparently so austin went if it will hold a bus i think it will hold your camera jeff so this is the final shot where we do a cheesy wave thank you so much to the i can you the go guys is that all right go to seven eggs for having me come to seven oaks ride their buses download the app uh drt it's possibly the future of travel there's like magic a bus just turns up but a great day out thank you so much i think we do the cheesy wave now thanks everyone bye [Music] you

Channel: Geoff Marshall

Views: 267,522

Rating: 4.9512763 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: z0ddExZbKD8

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/carrotnose258]

Good old Geoff

[u/Popaqua]

We use VIA in Norwalk, CT! Before COVID we were getting about 2k rides a month. Love the service.

[u/fissure]

Improve your bus system with this one weird trick! Jarretts hate him!