This article first appeared in the Bus-News magazine, Issue 1 2022.
The planning team at Oulu Public Transport Authority (PTA) was using anecdotal evidence to adjust run-times and create timetables, which was time consuming and led to inefficient schedules.
The team deployed Swiftly to analyse potential changes on a granular level, leading to shorter run-times, better relationships with operators, cost savings and improvements in on-time performance. Now the Oulu PTA takes an efficient, data-driven approach to planning and scheduling.
Oulu PTA needed a proactive approach to data. When the planning team adjusted run-times and put together new timetables, they relied primarily on anecdotal information, which made the planning process challenging and imprecise.
“The process for creating and adjusting timetables was difficult before Swiftly. It was quite time consuming.”
The planning team was only able to implement changes a few times a year. Operators and passengers would have to wait months until a scheduling problem was fixed.
The planning team deployed Swiftly to get a granular understanding of where to make changes.
“We have always had plenty of data, but because we didn’t have any analytical tools as advanced as Swiftly we weren’t able to fully utilise our data.”
Using Swiftly has transformed how the team builds new timetables.
“I use the On-Time Performance and Run-Times modules on a daily basis. Before, we adjusted our timetables a few times a year. Now we adjust our timetables every month. Before even a simple line would take multiple hours to analyse. Difficult cases would take us a whole day. Now it takes us anywhere from 15 minutes to three hours.”
Paananen and Väliaho gave an example of how they use Swiftly to make changes.
“We recently updated Line 20. The operator was saying we needed to add one minute to the total run-time for the route. Tomi and the team looked at it in Swiftly and actually ended up taking one minute away.”
“The problem on that line was that it wasn’t spaced out right. We needed to take some time out of one part of the route and put it elsewhere.”
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