From Post bus to SOAST bus
Rod Macdonald
SOAST is demand responsive transport integrated with parcel delivery that could provide a revolutionary new way of running public shared transport in lower density housing areas, says Rod Macdonald, Visiting Professor of Holistic Civil Engineering at Heriot Watt University
SOAST – Suburban-fringe On-demand Algorithm based Shared Transport – was conceived out of my personal experience of living in Putney, London then moving to the foothills of the Ochil Hill in Perthshire, Scotland.
In London I averaged some 2500 car miles each year and travelled London and the world on public transport. In Perthshire my car mileage is some 18000!
Like many people I now live with no convenience store, no Post Office, no pub within five miles, no access to hospital or retail centre except by car, and a bus ‘service’ with a stop a mile and 20 minutes walk away, a bus once in three hours and the last one at 8.30pm, in other words in car dependant housing.
A large proportion of the population live in such housing and we build more of it each day across the UK. The result is many tonnes of harmful carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Another result is the break down of communities through isolation.
There are delivery vans travelling to these remote car dependent houses sometimes several times a day
At the same time there are delivery vans travelling to these car dependent houses, sometimes several times a day.
Our public transport buses operate on fixed route and fixed timetable systems that were appropriate in their day but are not now. Smartphones and real-time data open up new and more relevant ways.
Think of the old Post Office bus (introduced by the Royal Mail in 1967 to replace rapidly declining local bus and rail services in rural areas and provide a community service) but with a new twist. A vehicle carrying both people and parcels and being available for people to travel from where they are to where they want to be by making a smartphone App request.
Think of being able to travel from any post code to any other post code and all these requests and the parcels’ delivery needs being managed by AI in real time using machine learning to optimise the routing and timing of the vehicle route.
Smartphones and real-time data open up new and more relevant ways
The delivery company would deliver pre-sorted parcels in crates to a central depot. The SOAST vehicle delivers from there, reducing cost to the delivery company and releasing money to help fund the bus. For passenger journeys that are more than local, the passenger would be told the links to national bus a train routes and the overall journey time.
There are challenges. If the van continues to deliver to each front door the journey time for passengers becomes too great. So, arrange a locker station serving a group of postcodes and a last mile delivery system operated by local people using electric trolleys and bikes all monitored by QR code. The SOAST vehicle delivers the parcels in crates for a quick drop-off at the locker station. The bus journey becomes more direct and quicker. The community benefits.
The system needs local and national government policy support, and it needs transport businesses (bus and parcel) to be open to cooperating, perhaps joint venturing, in new ways that have the potential to be better business propositions and requiring less government grant.
Our research paper can be found here
The analysis model and the detail of the modelling and be found here
I worked on the Heriot Watt SOAST research project with Prof Phil Greening and Prof David Corne at Heriot Watt and Jenny Milne from the Scottish Rural and Islands Transport Community SRITC, along with our funders UKCRIC and our contributors Stagecoach Group, Menzies Distribution, TrackM8 and The Routing Company.
After detailed modelling, and discussion with bus and parcel companies, we have found the approach could be highly effective, especially in rural and semi-rural areas, and in the context of on-demand bus services.
We are ready to take this research forward seeking to resolve the issues that were not part of this study and to set up pilot projects across the country to fully evaluate the SOAST system.
Rod Macdonald OBE, FICE, MInstRE is RAE Visiting Professor of Holistic Civil Engineering at Heriot Watt University. He was a founding partner of engineering services consultancy Buro Happold and became its chairman. Known for thought leadership, Rod has worked internationally in infrastructure and civil engineering, air transport capacity, wind energy, nuclear energy, smart city development, modular structures, advanced security surveillance in transports systems. He is currently lecturing, tutoring, creating and assessing undergraduate projects.