TAN to exhibit at Travel2020

Transport Associates' Network are delighted to be exhibiting at Travel2020, at the Kia Oval, London, on Wednesday and Thursday October 10th and 11th.

TAN members John Austin and Peter Warman will also be chairing sessions at this important event.
Travel2020 is the cross-modal event focussed on the travel offer and experience rather than the hardware on which people ride, and brings together innovators to share experiences, debate and do business. With a superb list of speakers - including Norman Baker, Undersecretary of State for Transport - and over 50 exhibition stands, it is the must-attend event of the year for those interested in the future of passenger transport in Britain and the rest of Europe.

John Austin shares his impressions of Public Transport in Canada

John Austin has recently returned from a family holiday in western Canada and took time to observe and travel on public transport while he was there, and compare it with his experiences of both USA and Europe and Australia. He writes as follows: naturally his views are entirely his own.

“ The coverage of public transport in urban areas in Canada is impressive. The city of Calgary, AB, has a quite dense bus network across all types of residential community and light rail lines, and a strong focus on Park & Ride, both BRT and LRT-based. And even towns as small as Banff, in the Rockies, and Revelstoke, BC, both with populations of around 7,500, have their own bus networks.

The entrepreneurship of some smaller operators such as Tofino Bus (in western Vancouver Island), with a mobile-enabled website, and Pacific Coach, with on-board wi-fi, integrated coach / crosswater express services and attractive informative leaflets, also impressed.

Yet, some aspects of public transport in Canada left me underwhelmed. Whilst Vancouver has what seems to be efficient transit operations, with driverless metro trains, and many electrically-powered buses and articulated buses, the customer information struck me as poor. Despite Vancouver’s transport authority, Translink, having the popular and useful Google Transit tool, this does not appear to be integrated with Translink’s own Journey Planner on its mobile app, at least at the customer-facing end of the process. Also system maps are not widely displayed at bus stops or shelters, while there appears to be no walk-in transit customer service centre and it wasn’t clear how to obtain hard-copy maps or other information for the whole transit network. The impression I had in Vancouver was of a system which was only partially successful in promoting a city-wide network to its customers and where there was no convincing sense of stop or hub hierarchy – which is an important element in getting customers to use transit beyond just their ‘own’ local bus or train.


Visible customer information was also poor on the parts of the Greyhound express coach network that I saw. Whilst Greyhound’s website is attractive, the site does not seem to be mobile-phone enabled and there does not yet appear to be any official Greyhound smartphone app. At the Greyhound terminals I visited I was also unable to find any Greyhound leaflets on display for customers to take away.


Proper integration of electronic information for passengers with on-street, on-vehicle and hard-copy publicity, in terms not just of content and presentation but also of availability, is a key element in making public transport visible and attractive to potential users in the 21st century. This is a message that isn’t yet understood throughout the industry as much as it might be. But I am looking forward to hearing of UK developments in this area at the forthcoming Traveline conference in Birmingham on September 27th: see http://traveline2012-estw.eventbrite.co.uk/


For more information on my impressions of Canadian public transport e-mail me at john@analytics.co.uk ”

TAN holds successful quarterly meeting, and is excited to be involved in ITS UK

TAN held a successful quarterly meeting last week followed by a very enjoyable New Year lunch: our excuse to extend the festive season just that bit longer. Many TAN people are currently very busy on projects which meant that a few of our 25 members were unable to attend.  

 

A key item on the agenda was a visit from Jennie Martin, Secretary-General of ITS UK, who welcomed TAN as a Foundation Member of ITS UK and told us about the organisation's role and objectives.  Although a few members of TAN are already members of ITS UK, the new involvement of TAN itself as a member of ITS UK enables it to put forward a view from the SME sector and will hopefully assist ITS UK in being even more effective in representing the ITS community within the UK.