How’s this for a little thought experiment. Try imagining some of the rail journeys you’ve been on in the last few years. The ones with your colleagues, the ones with your mates, the ones with your family, the trips to places you know and those you don’t; every single one of these journeys requires different kinds of information. Maybe you’ve got a buggy, maybe you don’t know about the onward transport very well, maybe the air conditioning’s broken or there’s disruption, maybe your Dad’s in a wheelchair, maybe the train’s disrupted and you’re now not sure about your ticket. The point is that the British railway does a brilliant job of moving metal tubes around, but thinking about the people inside those metal tubes? Less so. If at all.
Changing track for a moment. I once went to a lecture by Dr Mark Thomas, a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics, who made the point that availability of information and the pace of civilisation’s development are co-dependent; put information into people’s heads and interesting things will start to happen. Don’t do it and the National Rail awards will continue handing out gongs to bridges and introducing talks on innovation with reference to The Rocket.
If I knew, before I got on the bus, that the lift at Waterloo wasn’t working, and the accessible toilet on the train was out of order, I would probably take a different route, but tomorrow I’ll check again and maybe the lift will be fixed. If I turn up with my walking stick and I find the lift isn’t working and then I’m forced to soil myself on the train, I’ll likely never use that form of transport ever again.
In a real-time world where everything is at our finger tips, why is complex transport information so hard to find? Partly this is due to the commercial model that governs all transport. Whoever sells you your ticket becomes your information gatekeeper. Transport Operating Companies can at best only communicate directly with about 10% of the customers onboard their trains. For bus companies it’s even less. Plus, ticket retailers are interested in selling tickets, the information thing is a bar that they have to meet, not one they want to jump.
This is why I think the creation of GBR is such an exciting opportunity. GBR could step into this information breach, join up the disparate sources of information running right across the industry and surface it to customers when they need it in a format that is easy for everybody to understand. Why am I so excited? Because GBRTT are already doing this. They even have a committee called Smarter Information, Smarter Journeys. It’s all happening and it’s going to change the way we travel, making public transport more private, more personal and less daunting.
Whoosh have been working with Operators and Network Rail on a personalised real time information platform accessed via a QR code sticker on the back of seats and in stations. Where it’s live the platform is the Operating Companies’ most-used digital touch point, with approximately 3 out of 10 passengers scanning the sticker. Within this digital platform is the industry’s first accessibility planner, which links into Network Rail’s dynamic station maps. All these systems do is aggregate existing information, often buried somewhere in a pdf, and surface it to the passenger in a format (a planner, a map, a line of text linked to a journey) that is accessible to all, at the moment when they need it. Add in contextualised fault reporting that allows passengers to help with the upkeep of their railway and we’re starting to think about the passenger in a totally different way.
Personalised real time information can be boiled down two key benefits. On a hum-drum journey it is reassuring and makes the passenger feel good. We all like it when minutes tick down on ‘the next tube is due screen’, we like it because we’re human, and humans like certainty. What humans don’t like are swamps, possibly crawling with snakes and crocodiles. During disruption existing information structures is incapable of meeting the complex passenger needs with the result that passengers feel let down. We don’t feel let down by the tree on the line, that’s life, we feel let down that the industry didn’t tell us where the rail replacement bus was, and mark it neatly on a map, like when I order an Uber. That information update is coming and I have every confidence it will transform the railway.
Edmund Caldecott
Edmund Caldecott is CEO of Whoosh Media.
