Public urban transport planning centre

Summary

Funchal has set up a fully integrated monitoring and passenger information service facilitated by a new public transport control centre.An Urban Transport Planning Centre is useful for gathering, processing, and analysing relevant information about the performance of the urban public transport operator, making use of new available technologies.

Implementing sustainable mobility

Since February 2007, Funchal’s public transport operator has managed an advanced contactless ticketing and GPS monitoring system that gathered a continuous flow of data on service performance. This data has however not been integrated in a way that facilitates transport planning and decision-making processes. This is the reason why Funchal shough to set up a new monitoring control centre that integrates the data so as to properly control and manage the public transport fleet and feed into the city’s mobility policy.

The main objective of this measure was to establish an Urban Transport Planning Centre to support decision-making processes based on relevant and reliable data and encourage use of PT by providing users with better information. Decision-makers, PT users in general and especially tourists are therefore the target groups for this measure.
The Planning Centre measure has unrolled as tools were implemented and studies were carried out, influencing to some extent all the network streamlines and the reorganisation of public transport in the city of Funchal.

Progress

Implementation of the Urban Transport Planning Centre mainly consisted on the establishment of new institutional agreements, which were settled between stakeholders in order to feed the software with relevant data.
In addition to this, the PT Operator has also worked on an integrated definition of what better urban public transport system is about and the evaluation of hypothetical mobility scenarios using simulation modelling tools to support the decision-making process.
At the forefront of the new IT tools developed within CIVITAS-MIMOSA, one should outline that the PT Operator has included a tourist itineraries application in the Travel Planner tool that really encourages tourists and locals interested in discovering the Island. This will certainly be tourists favorite application to move around Madeira in a sustainable way, as it provides valuable tips and even tours using the public busses solely. All of this is available on: http://www.horariosdofunchal.pt/planearviagem/

Outcomes

All the work carried out meant that information was immediately available when planning or operational decisions needed to be made thus allowing practitioners and managers to be more effective. This removes the delay and cost associated with deficient data and the uninformed studies which would otherwise be implemented.  All in all, this measure has experienced some excellent development for long term efficiency. The key results are as follows:
• The informatic system to manage complaints has reduced the response time to less than 1 month – complainants now have more reasons to be satisfied. The informatic system that HF has developed not only gives an automatic answer assuring that the complaint was duly received and is being properly addressed, but also the answer time has been reduced to 1 month thanks to the informatic system which redefined and smoothed the internal working flow of the PT operator making it more efficient.
• The Travel Planner will target new market niches and provide thematic tourist routes as an innovate outcome – The Travel Planner is one of the bolder actions taken forward within this measure and is likely to encourage tourists and not regular PT users to use the PT service more often in the future.
• Thanks to the Planning Centre, senior managers spend more time analysing a lot of information and can consequently make wiser decisions.