Hot on the heels of the firm’s launch with megabus, Peter Jackson learns more about uTrack and how it’s helping take operators’ customer experience to the next level
Maybe you’ve heard of uTrack – they work with some of the UK and USA’s largest operators, after all – but if you haven’t, you’ll have certainly benefited from the company’s work if you’ve ever ridden on a National Express or, more recently, megabus coach. That’s because uTrack’s highly advanced, data-driven systems are the unsung operational heroes of a growing number of well-known operators, and work around the clock to ensure passengers arrive on time.
Founded by engineers Eamonn Hughes – the company’s CEO – and Chief Technical Officer Conor Gildea, uTrack pioneered real-time tracking technology in the coach and bus industry when it launched its first system back in 2010. “We built a solution for a company in Ireland, Dublin Coach, which was founded by the guy who originally setup Aircoach, John O’Sullivan,” Eamonn recalled.
“John came to us having heard we were creating tech for private coach operators, and asked if we could come up with a solution for him. We came up with a real-time information system that made use of their existing WiFi and GPS systems to provide a real-time feed, and designed an app for passengers.
“We brought the likes of National Express Coach over to see what the system looked like, and they thought it was interesting for a smaller operator but didn’t think it would scale up to an operator of their size. They were still willing to give it a go though, so we did a pilot which worked pretty well, and they ended up rolling it out across their business.
“At that point, we pitched a whole new vision for them. We were surprised how they didn’t really have effective tracking to know what their operators were doing, and although they had real-time information for their customers, the departure boards were static and staff didn’t know what was going on… it was a bit of a mess. So from 2011 onwards we started developing solutions with them, and started working with other bus companies to enhance our products and services.” 
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Going global
2014 was a breakthrough year for the Dublin-based firm: “That year,” Eamonn continued, “we started working with Greyhound Bus in the US – our first international customer – and continued to bring in new technologies. We’ve made a lot of enhancements to our product since we started out, not just for real-time information and punctuality but things like integrating our system into the booking process, understanding how people are travelling, understanding the impact of delays on connections, and basically building a system that will work and scale for operations of different sizes in different parts of the world.
“In 2016, we started working in the school bus market in a big way; our biggest deployment is with First Student, which has 45,000 school buses using uTrack making 5.5m student journeys every weekday, from the east to the west coast and even in Canada.
“We then began working in the urban bus market with First Bus in the UK in 2017, tracking KPIs and a range of data so that the group could know what was going on across all of their OpCos and depots. It became a one-stop source of information for them, with everything available in real-time to reveal patterns and trends. It allowed them to benchmark their different OpCos and see where they were struggling and things like that. The system can make suggested timetable improvements as well based on all the data.”
Today, its offering comprises three products: Origin, Rygo and Unity. Origin is, as the name would suggest, the foundation of uTrack – the back-office operational system that we’ve been learning about so far. Rygo, the company’s newest product, is a tracking and route planning app aimed primarily at passengers, although it’s also been used by operators and schools. Besides displaying the location of a vehicle in real-time and predicting an ETA for each journey, Rygo tracks passenger numbers – particularly handy during Covid – and allows passengers to purchase digital tickets.
Last but not least is Unity, a mobile app designed for front-line staff. Eamonn explained the story behind its development: “We began to realise that one of the biggest linchpins for performance was the driver, so we asked, ‘How could we improve the driver’s life and give them everything they need in their phone?’ The idea was to create an app that was so useful that a driver would want to install it on their own personal device. The result was Unity.
Again, we started off with FirstGroup, and deployed it across all their different divisions.
“We’ve added in features and functionality that’s very transport-specific; there are lots of companies out there doing employee apps, but not ones that have deep integration with systems that a lot of our clients will use – like Trapeze’s driver allocation software for example. We’ve integrated the app with that, and enhanced it further to make it a better experience for drivers. It makes a driver’s life a lot easier, and we’ve since deployed it at Go-Ahead and other operators.”
With rising demand came a need for expansion, and two years ago uTrack took another big step: “By 2019 we were expanding our team in the UK, and opened our Birmingham office,” Eamonn said. “We were due to open an office in Boston last year, but that has now been pushed back to this year.” 
One-stop shop
“Part of our approach is to be hardware and software agnostic,” said Eamonn. “That means we can turn up to any operator and, if they’ve got a network like megabus have with different operators with different kit in their vehicles, we can hook all those systems together. That gives operators a level of flexibility that other systems wouldn’t, and from a cost perspective, allows them to leverage the investments they’ve already made in different technology instead of starting from scratch.
“One of the things we’ve done with megabus is say, ‘You’ve got Icomera, you’ve got GreenRoad, we can feed all that data into our platform to provide you with a really nice tool to track all your vehicles and understand punctuality and reliability, plus we can also expose that information to your customers.’
“That’s what we’ve done with Coach Tracker; we’ve provided that system for megabus, and it has their branding. Using the app, you can search for your journey based on where it’s going from and to or even using your ticket number and email address. If you use the second method, the app will list the trips associated with your email address, and you can track them all in real-time.
“It’s quite a nice solution for megabus and it’s something that, hopefully over the next year, we’ll expand and improve upon. When you buy a ticket from megabus, you get an email confirmation. One of the things we’re looking to do is to put a link in that email to encourage passengers to use the tracking system.
“Once we got the green light from megabus, we were able to get the system up and running pretty quickly. When we were given access to all the data feeds, we had the system running in about a week, although the public-facing aspects like Coach Tracker took a little longer as we had to test them thoroughly. But in comparison to most IT projects, it was very rapid.
“Our system doesn’t just provide real-time information, which for a coach service is quite complicated in itself. We also take in data from the highways agencies, traffic collisions and road conditions, and feed all of that into our system. It will then flag up services that are potentially going to be affected by those external factors. That information can then be shared internally, or it can be sent to customers in what we call alerts; it’s quite nice because not only does it tell them there could be a delay, it tells them the reason for it.
“All of the data is used to help us continually refine our algorithms, so we can better predict patterns and trends for every section of road in the UK. We also look at things from a driver perspective too, so we can determine whether it’s a case of the drivers not adhering to the schedule or the schedule itself being unrealistic. It gives operators a bit more insight into whether they have a scheduling issue or a training issue – often it’s a little bit of both.”
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