With the introduction of the Regional Integrated Ticketing System in Dunedin and Queenstown, we were engaged by Otago Regional Council to streamline their public transport data management.
This system provides a single source timetable database which programmatically provides accurate, up to date data to:
- Council’s transport website
- Google Transport / Journey Planner
- Regional Integrated Ticketing System
- Programmatically generated updates of on-street timetables
- Programmatically generated updates of route timetables
Users of public transport engage with timetabling information in a range of ways both on and offline. This creates a challenge for those managing the flow of timetable information.
A few of the challenges they faced were as follows:
- There are multiple end sources for public transport timetable data, both electronic and hard copy.
- Providing numerous transport data feeds to various sources increases the opportunity for errors and discrepancies between end sources.
- There was no single source of the truth in relation to timetable data. This leads to double handling of data, errors and ultimately confusion among public transport users.
- Cost inefficiencies to engage multiple suppliers every time a change is made to timetables.
Thanks to Effect the updates to all of our digital and printed timetables have been significantly streamlined. The timely and accurate communication of bus timetables has contributed to a significant increase in patronage and user satisfaction
Julian Phillips, Public Transport Team Lead
Removing the opportunity for errors to exist between timetable sources.
The benefits of our timetable data management system is that there is only one place to update transport data. This removes the need for a designer to update PDF’s, printed timetables and on-street timetabling, making changes to all outputs streamlined.
