uTrackArticleCBW

SUPPLIER PROFILE / UTRACK
gives operators a level of flexibility that other
systems wouldn’t, and from a cost perspective,
allows them to leverage the investments
they’ve already made in different technology
instead of starting from scratch.
“One of the things we’ve done with megabus is
say, ‘You’ve got Icomera, you’ve got GreenRoad,
we can feed all that data into our platform
to provide you with a really nice tool to track
all your vehicles and understand punctuality
and reliability, plus we can also expose that
information to your customers.’
“That’s what we’ve done with Coach Tracker;
we’ve provided that system for megabus, and
it has their branding. Using the app, you can
search for your journey based on where it’s
going from and to or even using your ticket
number and email address. If you use the
second method, the app will list the trips
associated with your email address, and you can
track them all in real-time.
“It’s quite a nice solution for megabus and it’s
something that, hopefully over the next year,
we’ll expand and improve upon. When you
buy a ticket from megabus, you get an email
confirmation. One of the things we’re looking
to do is to put a link in that email to encourage
passengers to use the tracking system.
“Once we got the green light from megabus,
we were able to get the system up and
running pretty quickly. When we were given
access to all the data feeds, we had the
system running in about a week, although
the public-facing aspects like Coach Tracker
took a little longer as we had to test them
thoroughly. But in comparison to most IT
projects, it was very rapid.
“Our system doesn’t just provide real-time
information, which for a coach service is quite
complicated in itself. We also take in data from
the highways agencies, traffic collisions and
road conditions, and feed all of that into our
system. It will then flag up services that are
potentially going to be affected by those external
factors. That information can then be shared
internally, or it can be sent to customers in what
we call alerts; it’s quite nice because not only
does it tell them there could be a delay, it tells
them the reason for it.
“All of the data is used to help us continually
refine our algorithms, so we can better predict
patterns and trends for every section of road
in the UK. We also look at things from a driver
perspective too, so we can determine whether
it’s a case of the drivers not adhering to the
schedule or the schedule itself being unrealistic.
It gives operators a bit more insight into whether
they have a scheduling issue or a training issue
– often it’s a little bit of both.” //
megabus says the system
is helping make its services
more accessible than ever
megabus refreshed its
coach livery late last
year. RICHARD SHARMAN
24 / CBW / 26 January, 2021 www.cbwmagazine.com