An on-demand night transport pilot in Sosnowiec aimed at reducing costs of night public transportation and increasing availability of public transportation by reducing waiting times and increasing flexibility to allow rides between any two stops.
An on-demand night transport pilot in Sosnowiec aimed at reducing costs of night public transportation and increasing availability of public transportation by reducing waiting times and increasing flexibility to allow rides between any two stops.
Since 2019, Sosnowiec has been looking for a way to reduce the cost of night transportation, including tram lines in particular. Trams are a very efficient means of transportation in the city: they don’t wait in traffic jams, they are environmentally friendly and can carry a large number of passengers. At night, however, when transporting only a few passengers at a time, the said benefits of trams simply could not justify their high costs. Combined with the once-per-hour frequency, the Mayor of the city decided to look for an alternative form of transportation that would reduce night transportation costs and make it more available to city inhabitants at the same time.
Thanks to the cooperation of PKM Sosnowiec, the metropolis and Blees, we were able to launch an on-demand night transport pilot based on the following components:
Instead of trams, passengers could take a bus ordered through a dedicated passenger app. The app enables you to choose a ride between any two stops, with pick-up or drop-off at any desired time. Within seconds, the passenger receives information on what time the bus arrives and the approximate time of drop-off. Being able to order the bus 24 hours ahead, passengers can e.g. order a ride in the morning for their evening return from work and be certain that the bus would arrive at the promised time.
Passenger carriage is carried out efficiently by one bus but it is possible to extend the fleet in case of a higher passenger demand or an increased number of stops to keep service availability sufficiently high. Distribution of passenger traffic among feel vehicles and route optimisation is the responsibility of the Blees system, which uses complex algorithms for this purpose.
Smooth rides were facilitated by the driver’s app, which collected real-time passenger requests and information about the stop to be visited next. The app simplified the process so that the driver didn’t have to plan the sequence of passenger pickups but only navigate as directed by the app and mark the pick-up and drop-off of passengers as completed.
“After one month of the night bus operation, we can see the idea has worked. A total of 320 passengers were transported between 30 June and 31 July. The best day was 12 July, which was the night after the Euro 2020 finals. During the period, a total of 389 users have registered with the app, of which about 100 are active (they have used the service at least once). This means that one user travelled more than 3 times on average,” commented Arkadiusz Chęcinski, the Mayor of Sosnowiec, after the first month of the service operation.
