Lancashire County Council has been working with Alchera Data Technologies and Atkins to trial Alchera’s Pinch Point Analysis Tool across 59 junctions in east Lancashire. The tool is a software-based machine learning application that identifies and helps to lessen the impact of bus pinch points on the network, with the aim of making buses faster and more reliable. The partners expect a full rollout later in the year across all of Lancashire’s junctions on existing bus routes.
Lancashire County Council (LCC) has been working closely with local bus operators to develop plans on how to improve the reliability of bus services following the Government’s National Bus Strategy. Martin Porter, Principal Engineer for Network Management at Lancashire County Council, explained: “Improving the performance of the bus network is a top priority for LCC. We know there are issues at some junctions across the network but we need evidence – objective data – to back up our assumptions so we can secure the government funding we need to make improvements. We also need to be able to measure the interventions to see how well they are working and avoid similar issues in the future. Alchera gives us the capability to do that in real-time.”
Alchera’s Pinch-Point Analysis Tool (PPAT) fuses data from several sources including the Bus Open Data System (BODS) and existing transport sensors to analyse the impact each junction has on the average speed of buses on individual routes as well as the observed impact on the consistency of the bus schedules moving through intersections. The analysed data can then be used for various tasks such as identifying high-priority junctions that need interventions, enabling data-driven decisions and providing much-needed objective data to support applications for road improvement funding.
Tony Brown, Technical Director at Atkins, said: “Alchera has not only given us the insight to understand where the problems are across the network but also to understand the economic impact of those delays.”
Anna Jordan, Co-Founder at Alchera, added: “When you are trying to deal with complex, congested cities, reacting to situations in real-time is key. Our largest system integration combines thousands of sensor sources and performs hundreds of thousands of measurements every day.
This represents the only demonstration of absolute, real-time traffic counts and classifications, at a city scale, in the UK today. Data in the system is handled in a fully transparent and auditable way – recognising that data ownership and usage will be critical in future smart cities.”
