CitySwift’s new Headway Simulation feature is helping bus operators and authorities move from reactive fixes to proactive network planning. We spoke to Alan Farrelly, CitySwift’s co-founder and chief commercial officer

 
CitySwift aims to allow operators to make better decisions for passengers (Picture: Shutterstock)

 
Bus network planning has always been a balancing act between punctuality and productivity, between passenger satisfaction and resource efficiency. Traditionally, runtime, headways, and timetables have been adjusted in reaction to problems rather than in anticipation of them, but what if operators and local authorities could see the network-wide impact of those changes beforehand?

That’s the theory behind CitySwift’s new Headway Simulations module, a data-driven innovation that gives industry professionals the power to optimise and scenario plan headway changes virtually before making costly on-the-road changes. Coupled with CitySwift’s existing runtime capabilities, it’s now possible to optimise and simulate a service’s entire timetable in the platform.

Alan Farrelly, the company’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, calls it a breakthrough moment in bus industry data use. “We know the bus industry generates terabytes of data,” says Farrelly. “We’ve gone in and made that data usable. We’ve done analytics on why things happen and optimisations to make sure the bus comes on time, but the really interesting breakthrough we’ve had is on simulations: the ‘what if I?’ questions. ‘What if I add in a bus?’, ‘What if I take a bus away?’.”

Those simple but powerful ‘what ifs’ have long defined the art – and in many cases frustration – of bus scheduling. Until now, operators relied on experience, instinct, and time-consuming manual analysis to predict how changes might ripple across networks. CitySwift’s new feature turns that on its head by allowing operators to simulate entire networks and predict how changing runtime, headways and timetables will affect reliability, demand, and resources.

“It’s the oldest thing in the business,” Farrelly notes. “When we’re onboarding new hires at CitySwift, I give them ‘Buses 101’ and sit them down and tell them how buses work. And it’s this: the peak vehicle requirement (PVR) equals run times divided by headway or frequency. Run time goes up, guess what? The PVR goes up and the costs of that can be significant.”

Optimising that balance between run time, PVR and headway has always been key to both efficiency and profitability. But, Farrelly explains, headway management is complex.

“If we were to imagine you are a new operator and suddenly you have to decide whether to run a 10-minute or 12-minute, or 15-minute frequency, how do you know what to do? It’s very complicated. You change one route and you’re not just affecting that route, you’re affecting every route in the network.”

We can accurately predict what happens if you change the frequency, what it does to run times and passenger demand

Headway Simulations models these complex interdependencies, allowing users to see the impact on others or wider passenger flows.

“Our big innovation has been understanding where everyone is going to and from,” says Farrelly. “We can accurately predict what happens if you change the frequency, what it does to run times and passenger demand.”

Different routes, he adds, have different elasticities, meaning a tweak on one can have unexpected consequences elsewhere. “You affect one route, you affect the whole lot,” he says. “Essentially, we’ve used our computational power to allow people to simulate what will happen and therefore optimise the frequency.”

The benefits are clear. For operators, more efficient frequency planning can improve yield and reduce wasted mileage. For authorities, it provides a holistic view of network performance and passenger impact, which is vital for managing publicly-funded networks.

Farrelly points to England’s fare cap as an example: “Patronage has been declining; operators want to take some frequency out and move that resource to a growth route. So it’s about speeding up that decision-making process; it’s the ‘what if I?’ again. It saves so much time. It gives people confidence and it improves efficiency.”

But Farrelly is clear that CitySwift’s technology isn’t about replacing human expertise – it’s about enhancing it.

“Every bus business has really experienced, knowledgeable teams who understand the intricacies of bus scheduling,” he says. “But they never really have the time to dig deep into it because they’ve entire networks to consider. We’re speeding up the brilliance of those people – it’s not about replacing them, it’s about allowing them to make decisions faster.

“It’s all about empowering the people who run our networks every day, giving them the insight, confidence and speed to make better decisions for their passengers.”

 
Brought to you by Passenger Transport.

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