Optibus
Scheduling & Planning For The Social Distancing Era
In the past several months, public transportation is facing a staggering amount of uncertainty. First, services were cut and ridership dropped. Then restrictions were eased and service changed some more. Funding, ridership and additional factors turned what was once a stable operation into a service that changes all the time. In this new world of social distancing, agencies and operators must come to terms with planning for a new reality: the reality of multiple scenarios.
In the world before Coronavirus, there were several constant truths: ridership was all-important, the metric that proved that the transportation service was worthy of the public’s trust. Funding was more or less constant. Another truth was that service and the resulting crew and vehicle schedules seldom changed. The absence of large changes is also due to the fact that planning and scheduling public transportation is notoriously difficult and requires a lot of work, expertise and technology as well as regulatory and/or public approval.
All this has changed. The sudden realization that service has to be reduced during the early lockdown phases has been replaced by the understanding that service is bound to change yet again, forcing the industry to come to terms with a new reality: there are going to be many service scenarios that need planning and scheduling, and this is going to impact how the industry uses technology and understands its operational results.
This ebook will discuss several aspects of the need to change planning and scheduling often and the impact they have on current industry practices.
Making Service Reductions
When the Coronavirus hit, we heard a similar message from agencies all over the world. They needed to prepare for driver shortages. We were asked to help model service in case of two scenarios – 10% or 25% driver absenteeism, as a result of quarantines or infection. Early on, this was the initial concern in the industry – protecting bus drivers and dealing with the ramifications of crew shortages. Even before the virus, the issue of driver shortages was a core focus of many scheduling exercises, looking to reduce duties and roster rows. Yet, as lockdown approached and the need to reduce service became evident, the driver shortage concern became secondary.
Indeed, after the industry began disinfections, fare elimination and rear-door boarding, the main concern was how to cut service. Many agencies moved to some form of weekend service. Others cut service span, frequency and coverage, based on either ridership data or estimates as to the demand for their services when lockdown is in effect. At this point, making service changes solely based on driver shortages wasn’t the core need.
Scheduling implications:
- Driver shortages
- Cutting span, frequency and coverage
- Quickly modelling new preferences for driver safety
- Rosters
- Collaboration and remote work
Growing Service Again – Planning for Social Distancing
As lockdown ended, service is beginning to return to normal. Yet, this isn’t as simple as it sounds, and may require dealing with even more scenarios, as funding, ridership and, most importantly, crowding requirements change. Specifically, requirements such as crowding prevention are a game-changer with regards to many historical scheduling and planning practices.
- Controlling crowding
- Scheduling considerations for growing service again – When thinking of crowding, think of corridor planning, pay attention to running times, use ridership data to make decisions, use preferences to deal with driver safety and be creative when setting preferences
Conclusion
While the immense flux the transportation industry is in may seem overwhelming, the new demands of flexibility and scheduling ingenuity are also an opportunity to modernize and revisit many decades old practices. From moving to cloud-native systems to support remote work and collaboration to frequent changes that deliver better work for drivers as well as take ridership and crowding into account, this crisis may have the industry emerge with better operational practices, for the benefit of all.
