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2018 Transit Trends from Around the Globe: UK

Jan 08, 2018
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Transit Trends

We asked a group of industry experts – including partners, colleagues, and industry peers – to consider the influences shaping our sector to answer the question, “what's the biggest transit trend for 2018?” Here’s what they told us.

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) Will Start to Become Available…But the Lite Version

“There will be increasingly polarized debate around the role of app-based transport services such as Uber versus midi (minibus scale) and mass public transport. MaaS will start to become part of this debate but frustratingly for the customer, they are unlikely to see much change to services. Considering our audience has increasingly shorter attention spans, the time to market needs to become much shorter. It’s already becoming evident that enhancements and potential services which keep being trailed in the press are boring to customers when they do arrive as they do not understand why they were not available when first talked about.

The first services pretending to be MaaS will start to become available – though they are likely to only be aggregating multiple operators’ ticketing apps into single ticketing solutions. This is just hiding the complexity of the current multi-operator app environment, offering little other than allowing a reduction in the number of apps people need to use for ticketing.”

“MaaS remains a hot topic, but while I expect significant progress to take place, I’m not sure it will quite take over the transport world in 2018. Outside major cities, most UK transport providers are still trying to establish what MaaS means to them and the traveling public in their area. However, I do expect that 2018 will see elements of MaaS start to take greater hold across the country, starting with two critical components: 1) Genuine multimodal journey planning covering public and private transport modes, and 2) Integrated ticketing alongside journey planning (closing the loop by enabling prospective passengers to purchase tickets after enquiring about a journey). I believe these elements – representing a form of “MaaS-lite” – will evolve significantly in the next year, paving the way for subsequent developments in personal mobility.”

“In 2018, we will see an increasing focus on the integration of transport modes towards what will eventually become a MaaS model. For organizations traditionally involved in the delivery of demand responsive or statutory transport, integration with fixed services will offer passengers greater mobility and opportunities. This will simultaneously be driven by the impact of austerity on local authority budgets. As statutory and social funding become ever scarcer, the ability to feed passengers into mainstream routes will offer a precious means to increase patronage via corridors.

Finally, expect collation of transport data from different modes to be used to provide passengers with greater choice and alternatives. Ultimately, this will facilitate a shift towards a procurement model, whereby local authorities become brokers of information and quality controllers, rather than transport providers. In this model, technology partners will play an essential role: providing the tools to support integrated transport experiences – and ultimately access to opportunities.”

“There will be some growing transit trends in 2018, principally around the manipulation of “big data” and real-time data sets to offer public transport operators faster ways of responding to customer demands and market pressures. Operators will also need better and more efficient ways of managing and operating their assets, including with the development of new forms of alternative fuels. The same trends in data management will also be reflected in the growth, albeit slowly, of “pop-up” and semi-flexible operations not only in some interurban and intercity corridors but on a few urban pilot routes where legislation and local arrangements allow.

2018 will be a year where the potential barriers to the successful implementation of MaaS start to become a little clearer, after the enormous interest in it in 2017. Some of these barriers relate to the reliability of road-based services in the face of traffic congestion. But with a continuing paucity of major urban bus corridor infrastructure improvements, it is possible that alongside growth in urban rail (particularly as the first section of Crossrail opens), the biggest transit trend in 2018 could be a continuation of the slowdown in bus journey speeds.”

Consumers, Rather than Transit Providers, Will Drive How Their Trips Happen

“Change is happening quickly in almost every industry and almost every aspect of our lives. In transit, three big changes are occurring: the introduction of autonomous vehicles, the increasing use of electricity as a motive power source, and the rising power of the consumer to determine how he/she wants to travel. Of those three, I think the biggest trend will be that consumers, rather than transit providers, will drive how their trips from A to B will happen. With internet transport search hubs finding the ideal cost/time combinations for consumers, transit providers will increasingly compete to have the whole or just parts of consumers’ journeys.”

Autonomous Vehicles will Expand to Rail

“The growth in connected and autonomous vehicles, of all types and uses, continues apace. Transferring this to rail and light rail is what we will see coming to the fore, perhaps in a less public way. Supporting this are the disciplines of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Both of these technologies will also have an increasing impact on all other elements of transport, from customer information to ticketing and data analytics and operational management. 

Also coming are electric vehicles and the developing hydrogen cell trials which help improve the air quality we all breathe. Payment for travel is changing, but we need to remember that not all have bank accounts or smartphones or indeed that communications are sometimes not stable or good enough. Much is being made of MaaS, and I expect to see more schemes being launched in the next few years and the practicalities and management are sorted. One area is going to be the impact of MaaS on rural areas as a means to overcome the currently limited bus and alternate services.”

We’ll Rethink Transit Business Models

“There will be an increase in business model innovation. There will be relentless pressure to reduce the cost of traditional bus services, especially where these are, at best, marginally self-sustaining and rely on local authority support, and this will give rise to new approaches to service provision. There will be at least three dimensions of change:

  1. Increasing recognition that vehicles need to be fit for purpose – smaller vehicles may offer more flexibility and lower cost than buses.
  2. Increasing recognition of the passenger as a customer and not just as a user. Services which meet customer needs for information, timing, flexibility, etc. will gain traction and patronage.
  3. Using technology and data as the engine room to match service provision to customer needs. Deep understanding of customer expectations alongside traditional service operational excellence will enable new flexible service models to be developed and implemented.

To enable this: enterprising local authorities will stimulate and encourage business model innovation by smart definition of service expectations and by enabling new collaborations. Capabilities within the transit industry will expand to cover high-quality customer insight (perhaps from retail) and powerful data analytics. ”

“2018 will witness a significant change in how bus operators manage disruption at different levels within the organization. Until now, it’s fairly common for operators to define schedules weeks in advance, with little ability to update them to reflect the reality of what happens on the day. As a result, data exchange has broken down between operations and passengers. Technology integration is now removing silos that once existed. I think in 2018, bus operators’ operations teams will become more aware of their role in passenger information, using data standards to automatically pass information between departments.”

The Influence of the Bus Services Act Will Be Felt

“The influence of the Buses Bill on UK transport, signed in to law in 2017, will be felt in two main ways. Firstly, the Bill requires operators to share fare information – so expect to see a greater focus on integrated ticketing across regions, likely moving towards a national EMV scheme. Secondly, the Bill encourages the use of open data as a way to entice start-up developers to enter the market. I expect we will see this type of information used to drive innovative new applications, including MaaS-type solutions offering integrated ticketing and journey planning. The best innovations here are likely to be entirely new ideas that shake up the industry – so watch this space. One final thought: It won’t necessarily be complete in 2018, but I do believe that next year we will see an acceleration in the trend towards merging of DRT and traditional fixed route services.”

Cities Will Take a Strategic View of Ride Hailing Apps

“Ride hailing services continue to dominate discussions about new mobility opportunities in locations around the world. There is now an increasing number of operators including global players and local niche operators. However, a key trend is the ultimate role that these services will play in the delivery of urban mobility and how they can successfully work with existing publically funded transport services. Various markets often have quite divergent needs.

The issues in suburban America regarding the role and ubiquity of public transport versus small towns in Europe versus global megacities such as London and Paris are all different. However, there is a growing sense that a free market, a winner takes all model that “skims off” the most lucrative segments of the existing public transport service with little regard for the public obligations of urban life and priorities, is unworkable, and indeed unacceptable, in many cities.

Cities want to see innovation, but they also want to have a sense of control of collective urban life as well as the effectiveness of public investment in transport that reflects the needs and politics of the city. The relatively open market for ride-hailing apps is a potentially huge threat to this model. While these services have made the transport industry much more aware of the need for innovation and to react to competition, I argue that in 2018 we will see more cities taking a strategic view about these services and being much more prescriptive about how and where they should operate and taking measures to directly tackle their negative impacts.”

Where to Go from Here

Finding ways to balance the concerns outlined in this blog post alongside the ongoing drive for innovation seems to be an important challenge for the UK public transport industry in 2018. Indeed, balance is perhaps the key conclusion we can draw when considering what the global transit industry will look like in 2018 and beyond.

As our contributors have outlined, the future of our industry is rich with change and innovation – and it can come in many forms and from different sources. It is particularly interesting to hear Giles Bailey’s predictions of mobility solutions from emerging economies: “There should be no assumptions that the flow of innovation can only be one way. The coming year will inevitably see more innovations that have been conceptualized, tested and perfected in other economies rapidly coming to other cities in a globalizing world.”

But from wherever inspiration and innovation originate, none of us can ignore them. We must all find ways to negotiate this rapidly changing landscape, harnessing the opportunities, and responding to the challenges in front of us. 

 

Note: Some of our contributions had to be shortened. You can read them all in full here

Disclaimer: Please note that the quotes in this blog post only reflect the contributor’s views and opinions. Quotes do not necessarily reflect the blog author’s nor Trapeze’s views and opinions. 


 
Darren Turpin is the Marketing Manager at Trapeze Group UK. He is passionate about public transport and, as a London resident, is fortunate to have access to one of the world’s best public transport systems. Darren has a BA in English from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.
 
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