First responder

Sevenoaks operator Go-Coach made the leap to demand-responsive transport (DRT) with Via as Covid-19 hit last spring. Peter Jackson caught up with the firm’s Managing Director, Austin Blackburn, to learn how successful the project has been

Go-Coach has had its eye on DRT for a while. Founded in 2008, the Sevenoaks-based independent has always been happy to embrace new ways of growing its ridership, so DRT seemed like a natural step – it just required the right circumstances to be in place to make it a success.

“We’ve been planning the introduction of DRT for a couple of years, so it was on the horizon before Covid hit,” explained Managing Director Austin Blackburn. “The thing is, even though we’re very close to London here, we are really quite rural. We basically needed to start thinking about saving money if we were going to be sustainable as a business in the long-term – a lot of what we were doing was marginal at best.

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“So we decided back then – this was way before Covid – that we were going to go with some sort of DRT scheme. A lot of schemes have started in this country and then failed, so we wanted to do it in a different way and combine DRT with other things. I wanted a vehicle that I could use for commuters in the morning that would be far more attractive than a bus; I could then use it on SEN (special educational needs) school services just afterwards, and I’d done a deal with Sevenoaks District Council to take over the majority of transport for Age UK in the area. That would be a morning’s work, and then we could do the same again in the afternoon.

“The idea was that, when we were doing the stuff for Age UK, we’d also cover some of the really rural routes around here that are currently supported by the council. Most operators tend to do just one thing with their minibuses, but I thought the only way we could really make it work was to really sweat the assets – the vehicles need to be doing lots of different things.

“That was the plan, and it had been in the works since 2018. The vehicles we decided upon were Ford Tourneos converted into private hire spec. They were wheelchair accessible from the rear, had seven seats, air-conditioning front and rear and leather seats. Accessibility was a must if we were going to replace buses. They also had to appeal to commuters, because Sevenoaks was – prior to Covid – a major commuting town for people working in London. Sevenoaks Station was the third busiest in Kent, with the highest number of first-class season ticket holders – so we have a discerning bunch of people we had to appeal to. Personally, we’ve had bad experiences with Sprinters here, and they’re too big for some of the areas we need to visit.

“Buses to the station were running hourly at best in the morning and evening, and some of the services were commercial which we were obviously bearing the cost on. We were only carrying something like 3% of commuters to the station – a minute amount. So the idea was to do something that would be far more appealing to them.

“Having accessible vehicles also enabled us to do the SEN work, and the Age UK contract came along at a time when their vehicles were getting older and needed replacing. The District Council didn’t want to pay out for new vehicles, so they were quite keen to support our plans. In the end, we got funding from them for two vehicles of the four we currently have. Kent County Council bought into it as well, so everyone was going to be involved – it was going to be a total partnership.”

Time to reconsider

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Austin and his team certainly thought so, but as we know, even the best-laid plans often go awry. “When Covid came along, it changed everything,” recalled Austin. “Before that happened, we were planning to launch in May or June last year, but we had partnered with Via in December 2019. I didn’t know if they would be a good fit for us, even though they are the world leader, because we’re small and they’re massive. But actually it’s been a great partnership – they’re great to work with.

“Anyway, when we first partnered with them, they told us they could do a deployment in eight weeks, but that we didn’t have to rush into it. I was getting a little bit jittery about it all, but they were ever so laid back bless them! When Covid hit, they were offering ideas for different work we could do, but none of it really seemed like the right way forward for me. So I thought, ‘why don’t we withdraw all of the bus services we operate in the town and do it all with DRT?’

“With Via’s help and the blessings of the County Council, we withdrew all of our buses from Sevenoaks on 14 April and replaced them with DRT – all inside two weeks. The way that the Via platform works makes it so quick to get running; some of the bigger challenges were things like setting up the Braintree account, which processes passengers’ card payments, and that was only because they’re based in the US and were having issues over there.

“In those two weeks, we did all of the publicity, worked out the plan for the deployment, got the app running and launched the service. It was myself, our General Manager Andy Wells and our Business Apprentice Robert Chandler that headed up the team to do it, but we empowered everyone who was working on it to make decisions. You have to make all sorts of different decisions when you take on a DRT scheme – there are all sorts of parameters you need to set. We knew very little about it to begin with, but we made decisions and ran with them and just adjusted things if we needed to later on.

“To put it in perspective, GoSutton, the TfL scheme that’s now not operating, was powered by Via and had a team of 30 people working on it from TfL. With that many people working on a team, it becomes much more difficult to make decisions quickly.”

Even the vehicles initially bought for the go2 service have been made redundant due to social distancing requirements: “The Tourneos have come out beautifully, but we can’t use them at the moment because of social distancing requirements – they don’t have enough seats. At the minute, we’re doing go2 with smaller Optare Solos, and unfortunately the Tourneos are stuck with nowhere to go, which is sad. But it’s just a product of what’s going on at the moment.”

Passenger insight

“We did a survey back in November through Via, and we discovered that 20% of the people using go2 didn’t use our fixed-line services before – so we have achieved modal shift to an extent. But in reality, we’re still carrying a fraction of the people we were carrying before Covid. So there’s been positives and negatives,” accepted Austin.

“It’s hard to gauge properly how successful it’s been though because of Covid. We know that people like the service through passenger surveys and general feedback – we’ve had no negative emails or responses so far. People like the flexibility of it. But we can’t compare like-for-like with fixed-line routes because we’ve only run go2 in a pandemic!

“Saying that though, if there wasn’t a pandemic, we wouldn’t have been able to do DRT in the way we have; in normal times, we’d have never got away with replacing all of our fixed line services with DRT politically. So in some ways, Covid has helped us.

“When you think of how we operated buses in Sevenoaks before Covid, the most frequent services were hourly, and many only ran one day a week. Now, people have got a service that runs six days a week with an average waiting time of about 20 minutes, so it’s a totally different ball game.”

Staying with passengers, I asked Austin how the company had been coping throughout the Covid crisis. “Passenger numbers are desperate; in the Sevenoaks area during the daytime, we’re running at around 15-20% of normal pre-Covid levels,” he replied. “I’ve been keeping a close eye on Sevenoaks as we’ve been doing a lot of it with DRT, so I’m keen to see what balance we’re getting.

Is ridership lower now than it was at the beginning of the outbreak? “It’s hard to tell,” said Austin, “because when we first started DRT back in April last year, passenger numbers on those services were lower than they are now – although not by much. It soon built up in demand. I’ve been graphing our fixed line and DRT services in Sevenoaks since October, when restrictions started to come back in, and numbers haven’t been good at all since then.

“The reality is that there’s no good reason for people round here to go out – the town is pretty well closed. There are people going out shopping for essentials obviously, which is what we’re there for, but people round here generally do have cars. There still seems to be lots of cars on the roads. In the first lockdown, the roads were deserted – it was totally different back then. We’re nowhere near where that first lockdown was in terms of how seriously people are taking it.”

Life beyond lockdown

When Covid restrictions eventually do ease, Austin expects his passengers will want to return to fixed line services in greater numbers. “When things started to return back to normal a little bit last summer, we decided we had to bring some of the fixed lines back. Partly this was down to political pressure, and we knew that we would have to bring the fixed lines back when the schools went back in September. We didn’t want to do it then though, as it would have been pure chaos, so we had to bring them back before then.

“On 17 August, we brought back four routes in the Sevenoaks area using two buses instead of the usual four; the routes were running every two hours instead of every hour. The idea was to give people the option between fixed line and DRT. We worked with Via, so that now people using our app (which is now around 60% of our passengers) can view the details of fixed line services as well. You can’t buy tickets through the app yet, but we’re looking to introduce that by the second quarter of this year. Now that demand has dropped off again, we’re back to DRT only.

“One thing we realised when we started doing DRT was that, right from day one, we had people that were doing journeys that previously couldn’t have been done on just one bus. With a small network of six or seven fixed routes in a town, it’s very difficult to take everyone exactly where they want to go.

“We do lots of consultation here, and I’m part of the Sevenoaks town teams,” he continued. “In August 2019, we decided we wanted to make a diversion on one of our fixed line routes to improve its reliability, as there were often delaysaround a Tesco superstore. We had a public meeting at the town council and around 50 people attended; we explained what the issues were and why we wanted to change the route, and not one person said they were unhappy with it.

“So of course we went ahead with the change, but immediately when we started the DRT service we discovered that there were more passengers going to the Tesco in Riverhead than all of the other supermarkets in the town put together. Clearly people wanted to go there, but the consultation didn’t show that.

“DRT gives you amazing data. I can see where my riders buy their tickets, when they travel and how often, so we can do all sorts of marketing to make sure we engage with them. If there’s a problem, we can send a push notification out instantly, and we did that survey in November through the app; it’s very easy to engage with your riders. We’ve got all their details too, so we can even text them updates on their journey. When you run normal fixed line buses, you’ve got nothing like that. You can do surveys, but with Via it’s like having someone surveying your routes every day – it gives you masses of really good data.

“On top of that, passengers can rate their journeys and make comments through the app, so you can see if things aren’t going right. If someone doesn’t give us a five-star ride rating, we contact them to find out why, and what we can improve.

“On the flipside, it’s expensive; you can’t make a DRT scheme in a rural area commercial – any company that thinks they can is deluded! The startup costs are high – although thankfully Kent County Council paid for ours – as are the ongoing costs; out of a £2.50 fare, 40p of that will be going to other companies. You’re paying a booking fee to Via and to Braintree, and you’re paying for the use of a card payment. Without a doubt, you need some kind of subsidy.”

A new direction

Austin has a clear vision for the future of Go-Coach, and sees DRT as a key part of it – but not the only part. “What I’d like to see moving forward is different levels or ‘standards’ of public transport. This is something I’m often criticised for,” he admitted, “but I think it’s what people want. Personally, I would like to see fixed line services that cover the majority of the district, possibly quite infrequently, that accepted concessionary fares as well as normal fares.

“The next level up would be something like go2 Shared, which is what we’re running at the moment with the Solos,” he continued. “Maybe concessionary pass holders would get a reduced rate, but not free travel – they’d pay a percentage or something. The fare would be slightly more than on a normal, ‘level one’ bus.

“Then the third level – which we’re looking into at the moment as we have the Tourneos sitting around – would be go2 Premium. You’d go on the app, and it’d give you three options for the journey you want to make: you could wait half an hour for the number one bus to come along; you could have a DRT bus arrive in 15 minutes for a bit extra; or you could have a private ride in an even shorter time but for a higher price.

“The thing is, people don’t want to go on different apps for the same thing. If they want to make a journey, they want to have all of the options given to them on one app. So that’s the idea we have here and, while the lockdowns are slowing these things down, the County Council is broadly supportive, as are the local councillors – the service they’re getting now is way better than they were getting thanks to DRT.”

Thinking more about the long-term future of transport as a whole, Austin said: “The whole idea of multi-modal transport and Maas (mobility as a service) is what we all should be aspiring to work towards. Ultimately, we’ve got a real uphill struggle ahead to encourage people out of their cars. We might not have been losing the battle before Covid round here, but we are now. As a country and as an industry, we were already losing that battle, and since Covid began the Government has done everything it can to encourage people to use their cars! I think with that in mind, it’s now going to be terribly difficult to get people back out of them and onto buses. We’re going to need to do things in a different way.”

Be in no doubt, stressed Austin, the technology does have its limits – and the human touch will always be paramount: “DRT is not the total answer, it’s not the be-all and end-all. But the technology that’s out there today is an enabler – it’s allowing us to do things now that we could never have done a few years back. When you see it working, allocating passengers to vehicles in real-time, it’s like someone’s controlling it – but it’s just being done with an algorithm.

“It’s incredibly clever, and it’s enabled us to do what we’re doing, but it doesn’t give great customer service – there’s a limit to what it can do. The thing passengers like most about go2 – according to the survey we did – was the drivers, which is a great tribute to them and shows how important their role is.”

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