Kent County Council Optimise Route Planning

Kent County Council optimises its special educational needs transport services using a new routing technology.

20:31 16 July 2018

Kent County Council uses a cloud-based software from QRoutes to optimise 1,500 routes and re-planned transport for 4,000 special educational needs pupils and 1,000 people entitled to social care transport.

 

Shane Bushell, Client Transport Manager, Kent County Council, said: “At the heart of the reorganisation of our transport services was QRoutes which has enabled us to plan and optimise the transport for every one of almost 5000 clients. It’s a task that would have been impossible with manual planning and we’ve achieved savings of up to 15% through improved routing and vehicle utilisation.”

 

According to the council, the software cuts the planning time from three days to just a few minutes. It also offers better results as it is designed to simultaneously handle variable factors, including stop times and issues that affect special needs.

 

“For Kent County Council, customers are the heart of what we do and the automation provided by the system frees up time that is better spent dealing with the special needs of our clients,” adds Bushell.  “We’ve discovered some other significant benefits as well. Because it uses maps it is a very useful tool for showing how and why routes are calculated so we can explain decisions to clients and stakeholders. In addition the system gives highly consistent results for the shortest available routes used by our transport providers. QRoutes allows us to continually review services by testing different scenarios.  It means we can be sure we are always being as efficient as possible using tax-payers money well.”