Benchmarking Total Transport Solutions

ESOTERIX has secured funding from the Department of Transport to ‘Benchmark Total Transport’! 

Total transport, the idea of taking an integrated approach to the provision of multiple transport services by a local authority, has become a bit of a buzz phrase in recent years. The idea is to identify new and better ways to deliver joined-up local transport, remove duplication and save public money.

The Department for Transport (DfT)’s Total Transport Pilot Fund is providing £7.6m of funding to 37 local authority schemes to do this.

Schemes typically look to integrate transport for schools, Special Educational Needs, adult social care and non-emergency patient care with public demand responsive transport services, but there is currently no objective assessment of how well the integrated demand is routed and scheduled for delivery.

This matters because the success of schemes in delivering cost savings and other benefits depend on the performance of the routing and scheduling component.

Customers like to use some form of benchmarking when procuring products or services. But Total Transport solutions are difficult to benchmark during a procurement cycle since the integration has not yet happened and there is no data to work with.

Esoterix has secured funding from the Department of Transport’s T-TRIG competition to create a benchmark suite which covers a wide range of total transport scenarios. Local authorities will be able to choose the scenarios most relevant to their requirement and benchmark the performance of suppliers’ solutions against them.

By using the Total Transport Benchmark suite local authorities will be able to compare supplier solutions against scenarios matching their policy priorities and geographies.

There’s an adage that ‘what’s measured improves’ – and we’re excited to move forward with this project to ensure publicly funded total transport schemes have measurable benefits from the outset.