UK: The ‘closet renationalisation’ of the passenger rail sector provides an opportunity for the industry to be more honest with passengers about real-world performance, according to Jonathan Raper, founder and CEO of TransportAPI.
Described by the company as the ‘Rosetta Stone of performance data’, TransportAPI’s platform can also now offer operators access to a much wider range of industry data, bringing together information from the four different legacy systems used to identify trains for operational, performance monitoring and ticket retailing purposes. This makes it easier to analyse real-world performance, including actual rather than theoretical arrival and dwell times.
Speaking to Rail Business UK at the Transport Ticketing Global 2024 exhibition, Raper said the switch from franchises to management contracts means train operators are now more focused on ‘the customer experience rather than margins’. This is leading to subtle changes in the industry’s use of metrics, including a stronger focus on the root causes of problems.
Raper said passengers often build their own ‘guesstimated’ margins when planning trips because they do not trust official data, and the industry needs to ‘get a grip on this’ by making more use of real world information such as data on average delays to specific services.
All operators are currently looking at ways to boost their performance analysis capabilities, he said, and at TransportAPI ‘we have all the data’.
