Understanding real-world travel times represents a major advance in planning new locations for retail development, and can challenge conventional wisdom on how to tackle the process. And powerful geographic information systems can provide the key to efficient public transport provision, helping with every aspect from operational management to performance and service-level compliance monitoring.
These were among key points emerging from a Corporate Briefing event mounted this month by MapMechanics, the leading GIS and digital mapping specialist, at the Ordnance Survey headquarters in Southampton.
Retailer B&Q has been using the GeoConcept GIS from MapMechanics for site location analysis, and the company’s sites research analyst Gavin Ford told delegates that using NAVTEQ street-level map data with ITIS road speeds had given the company a much better understanding of customer catchments.
“Finding the right store location depends both on the size of the available catchment, and on how far people are prepared to travel,” he said.
ITIS data enhances digital mapping by attaching average speeds to individual road segments at different times of day, using billions of GPS readings gathered from thousands of vehicles in daily service. Using this data in isochrone analysis can give much more realistic estimates of true travel times than conventional analysis alone.
“Using ITIS road speed data made our isochrone analysis hugely accurate,” Gavin Ford said. In particular, he added, the data had given the company a new insight into rural catchments. “We found that the size of the site isn’t necessarily the primary factor in the overall attractiveness of the location; accessibility is often the key.”
To achieve convincing results in this kind of analysis, he said, the underlying data needed consistency and comparability. The sample size of the ITIS data was an important factor.
Software house Logical Transport develops comprehensive systems for planning, resourcing and managing passenger transport operations in both public and private sectors, and director Alan Willson told delegates that geographic information systems and data had come to represent key components in the ability of its products to deliver business efficiency.
GeoConcept, the GIS from MapMechanics, is now embedded in Logical Transport’s LT Enterprise suite, and the company also uses NAVTEQ Streets digital map data. These products allow the Enterprise suite to provide capabilities such as dynamic vehicle scheduling, real-time tracking of vehicle movements, and real-time allocation of pick-up requests to the most appropriate vehicles on a “best-fit” basis.
In addition to streamlining operational efficiency, Alan Willson told delegates the suite also helped users to monitor performance and verify contract compliance. “Operators can see exactly where vehicles are at any give time, and if necessary can confirm that they arrived when they say they did.”
Not only had the system been taken up by Transport for London and many local councils, he said; it was also used by private-sector clients, and had recently found some more unexpected uses. Recent applications included collecting and transporting immigrants and asylum-seekers.
Alongside presentations by users, delegates at the Corporate Briefing event also had the opportunity to hear about significant trends in the GIS world, including daytime population counts – a recent development by MapMechanics, This data shows daytime population according to the number of employees present in each section of street, helping to promote more effective resource planning. Another helpful innovation in this field is the availability of the Not Yet Built dataset, showing housing or other developments still at the planning application or construction phase.
The rise of interest in mobile computing was reflected in a presentation showing how routing and scheduling systems such as TruckStops from MapMechanics could be linked to vehicle systems in real time and integrated with in-vehicle navigation systems such as TomTom. Each call point in turn would pop up automatically on the driver’s in-cab unit, along with directions to the location.
As the company’s Owen Powell put it: “If drivers don’t know the routes and locations, automated navigation such as this is coming to be seen as an indispensable aid.”
Click here for more pictures |
