We spoke to Matt Carney, CEO of Go-Ahead Bus, about partnering with CitySwift to boost bus reliability and user experience in the UK and Ireland

 
A bus driver at Go North West

 
Last month, transport group Go-Ahead Group and technology firm CitySwift announced a ground-breaking UK and Ireland-wide partnership.

In the wake of very positive trials in East Yorkshire, Oxford and Newcastle, Go-Ahead has decided to roll out the use of CitySwift’s public transport performance platform across all of its bus operations in the UK and Ireland.

The goal is to make timetables more efficient and maximise service reliability, bringing benefits to customers and therefore helping to attract more people to use the bus.

Passenger Transport sat down with Matt Carney, chief executive at Go-Ahead Bus, to hear his thoughts on this ground-breaking partnership.

It’s all about care

A year has now passed since Carney was appointed to his current role, which gives him responsibility for strategic oversight for all of Go-Ahead’s bus businesses.

He was previously managing director (Australia) at Kinetic, the largest bus operator in Australia and New Zealand, which became Go-Ahead Group’s majority shareholder in October 2022.

Under new ownership and new management, Carney says that an emphasis has been place on care at Go-Ahead.

“We’ve changed our values to reflect care, fundamentally,” he explains. “So care for our customer, care for our people, care for the community, care for the environment and care for our assets.”

“At the heart of that is putting the customer first. We’re a public transport business. People rely on transport to get to school, get to work, get to hospital, see friends and all of that. So you ask, well what’s important to the customer, and punctuality and reliability are right up there. They are two of the most important features.”

For me, continuous improvement across everything we do in our business is super important. And if you look at our on-time performance, our punctuality and reliability, I think it’s good, but it could always be better

He continues: “For me, continuous improvement across everything we do in our business is super important. And if you look at our on-time performance, our punctuality and reliability, I think it’s good, but it could always be better, and I think that’s probably just a reflection of the whole market. Therefore we’re keen to explore every area possible that we can do to drive improvements.”

A proven solution

CitySwift’s public transport performance platform has proven itself capable of delivering improvements to punctuality and reliability. Over the past 12 months, Go-Ahead assessed its capabilities during trials in East Yorkshire, Oxford, and Newcastle, and the results speak for themselves.
“We’ve seen material benefits,” says Carney. “So we saw up to 14% improvement in service punctuality and, as a result, we’ve seen some patronage growth.”

“By validating the value of the platform, we’ve been able to see benefits in rolling that out across the UK.”
The 14% improvement achieved on one of the company’s routes, in Hull, will not be replicated across the group’s operations, but Carney is expecting to reap material benefits in performance.

“I don’t think ultimately we would have invested in this partnership if we didn’t truly believe that it will drive material improvement,” he says.

Next stops, Greater Manchester and Kent

CitySwift’s platform will be rolled out on a phased basis, starting with Go-Ahead’s Go North West and Kent Fastrack operations by the end of this year.

Go North West was created in 2019 when Go-Ahead entered the bus market in Greater Manchester. Since September 2023 it has provided franchised Bee Network services for Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) in Bolton and Wigan. Carney is keen to match the ambition of TfGM and Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester.

“They are exceptionally strong advocates for driving continuous improvement,” he says. “So we think they’re a great partner to work with to support that. That’s a great place to roll it out as a whole OpCo, because we’ve only done route-by-route in other OpCos.”

Bus franchising is new to the UK, with the Bee Network being the first application of powers introduced by the 2017 Bus Services Act, but it isn’t new to Carney. In his previous role as managing director (Australia) at Kinetic he was responsible for franchised bus networks for public transport authorities in Australia and New Zealand. He played a key role in growing the company from a single airport transfer business to one of the region’s most respected mass transit operators.

Carney says that Kinetic has a mature relationship with the PTAs it works with. “It’s not a master-slave relationship,” he explains. “It’s working together to ask ‘what’s best for the network?’.

“I think that’s the approach that we’re bringing here, bringing that mature relationship, that franchise management, into the market.”

In its commercial business, Go-Ahead has full autonomy over decisions about schedules and timetables, making it easier to drive change. In a franchised system the operator must persuade public transport authorities of the case for timetable changes, and CitySwift’s platform offers the scientific insights that can help with that.

It’s sharing that data with them, educating them to say, well, here are the lessons learned, here’s what we’re seeing in terms of performance and therefore here are the recommendations

Carney elaborates on this point: “It’s sharing that data with them, educating them to say, well, here are the lessons learned, here’s what we’re seeing in terms of performance and therefore here are the recommendations.”

CitySwift’s platform will also be rolled out to the Kent Fastrack operation by the end of the year. Go-Ahead has been awarded a 15-year contract worth £110m by Kent County Council to operate the award-winning Fastrack bus rapid transit system. Under the new contract, the service is operated by the group’s Go-Ahead London division.

Having witnessed the expansion of bus rapid transit system or “trackless tram” in Australia, Carney is enthusiastic about the potential of this flagship transport system. He expects the tram-style vehicles and associated infrastructure to be “game changing” and believes that other authorities in the UK will want to replicate it.

London calling

The remaining operating companies will follow soon afterwards. Among these operations is the giant Go-Ahead London, which provides nearly a quarter of London’s buses. Its fleet of 2,300 vehicles travels 80 million miles annually, and it will start using the CitySwift platform in February 2025.
Unlike Greater Manchester, where area-based franchises include a bundle of routes, Transport for London tenders its red bus network on a route-by-route basis.

Carney believes that the platform will enable Go-Ahead London to adapt to increasingly adverse traffic conditions which have seen average bus speeds drop from 9.8 mph to 9.2 mph over the past few years. London, he says, is the world’s most congested network, followed by Dublin, where Go-Ahead also operates and will also roll out the use of CitySwift’s platform.

He explains: “It’s a really good opportunity then to take live information, supported real world operating conditions, using AI-powered data processing, to say, ‘well here’s where we think that the pinch-points are in the network, route by route, and here’s what we think the changes should look like to optimise the customer experience’. I see this huge value there.”

An additional benefit is the enhanced real-time information on traffic conditions and congestion can provide better intelligence when bidding for new contracts.

The future has arrived

What was once regarded as futuristic will soon be used by all of Go-Ahead’s operations in the UK and Ireland. It will remove obstacles to accessing transport data, empowering Go-Ahead’s teams with rapid and reliable performance insights. So does Carney believe the use of this technology has now embedded itself in the mainstream of public transport operation?

“Yes, one-hundred per cent,” he responds. “Each of our operating companies has a scheduling team and rostering team and I don’t see that changing. What it’s doing is giving them far richer data to make decisions on. And then for us, at a group level, it gives us a group view of how we’re performing, where we are performing well, and where there are opportunities to improve.”

 
Brought to you by Passenger Transport.

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