Looking at journeys in a new way

Cambridge Consultants’ director of transport, Dr Liz Orme, looks at ways of improving the travel experience with better quality data

Last year, Cambridge Consultants and Arthur D. Little jointly issued a report entitled 2013: creating a better journey. The findings – based on the proceedings of a workshop for leaders in the transport sector – set out a provocative case for how technology might be deployed to improve the effectiveness of our transport infrastructure.

I say ‘provocative’ because, although we all recognize that something needs to happen, the user-centered high-technology solutions that the delegates identified are the sort of revolutionary ideas that have the potential to turn what is still a quite conservative industry on its head.

Right: Liz Orme believes the technologies to actively combat the effects of congestion exist, and the case for investment is straightforward. Development costs, she says, would be paid back many times over by savings in travel time, costs and emissions

Before I outline some of these possible solutions, let me describe the situation as we saw it then, and as it remains now. Put simply, transport is fundamental to the economy as a means of connecting people and moving goods. But years of economic growth have stretched our transport systems beyond levels where they can operate as reliably and efficiently as we demand. In parallel, there is an ever-increasing focus on carbon management, with one-quarter of the UK’s man-made greenhouse gas emissions coming from transport. Recent fluctuations in fuel prices have also had a measurable impact on traveling patterns and affordability. 

One way of looking for solutions is to focus on the traveler, and that was what we encouraged delegates at our workshop to do. Having acknowledged this as the basis for the emerging discussions, they headed off in a number of different directions, discussing sustainability and how to ensure an effective flow of transport data. For me, the one theme that stood out in particular was what we came to call ‘the contextual journey’ – the idea that a successful journey would be planned and made on the basis of a range of contextual information about the traveler’s specific needs and preferences in relation to the needs and preferences of other travelers and the transport system as a whole.

Technological advances have meant that real-time, location-aware data is actually already available to travelers, making the contextual journey a possibility in the short term. GPS chips are increasingly prevalent in consumer devices, and so the convergence of map-enabled connected devices that know your diary, where the next meeting is to be held, and how long it will take to get there (based on user-generated data) is not that great a step to envisage.

This new way of looking at journeys – with the traveler as a customer at the center of the journey – is valuable, incorporating the much broader social, environmental and economic context of the journey. Rather than simply trying to move large numbers of people from A to B, it encourages the optimization of the needs of individual travelers against the broader socio-economic factors that shape our collective need to travel. When information about other peoples’ journeys is incorporated too, we would suddenly be able to provide insights into our collective need for travel, which would in turn enable us to understand the potential impact of other journeys on a specific journey.

Of course, all this will require a new generation of devices to assist us make contextually planned journeys. The workshops provided a good opportunity to brainstorm what these might look like, incorporating the ideas of experts in transport, wireless communications, data management and device development.

The first idea was for a ‘contextual journey assistant’, providing a stream of real-time, context-aware information and acting as a true assistant for us in making our travel choices when planning our journey. These would extend beyond the current web-based and mobile phone planning tools by tailoring the journey to meet our specific requirements and maintaining an awareness of the expected and actual status of other travelers. Key to the success of advanced journey planning would be real-time access to data warehouses of transport information, including timetables, costs, bookings and current usage of the relevant transport network. Integration of the new service with existing ubiquitous portals such as Google or Yahoo maps would provide a real incentive for businesses to offer their data.

The second idea was for a ‘pocket travel buddy’, a personal device to which a range of contextually relevant information would be ‘pushed’ to the traveler wherever they are, including during their journey. For example, Sara’s device would know she’s due at home in Luton the night before a meeting in Bristol (and verifies this by checking her location via GPS). It will suggest the ‘best’ option for her journey around her personal requirements and the need for her to be at the meeting by 11.00hrs. Any problems that arise en route that could affect Sara’s journey would trigger suggestions that are sent to her so that she can take action. And when she arrives at her meeting, there is no need for her diary to remind her of the meeting in Bristol at 11.00hrs because it knows she’s already there!

Journeys today are largely disaggregated, with the provider of each stage of the journey supporting the delivery only of their section. For the whole journey to be contextually managed, it is critical to successfully integrate the different parts of the journey. It is also critical that users can trust the information given to them. The problems evident with current satellite navigation technology need to be avoided. For example, each device can in isolation recommend a route to avoid congestion, but the alternative route then gets more congested as the devices and data do not work in concert with one another. The truly contextual journey will go beyond simply recommending the theoretically faster route, and will be truly load-balancing based on user preferences and intelligent information integration.

Cambridge Consultants’ Dr Liz Orme is director of transport and is responsible for the firm’s intelligent transport systems activities. For more information about Cambridge Consultants, please log on to www.cambridgeconsultants.com

 

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