Our new Enhanced Vehicle Information has been rolling out over the last week to Passenger websites with Live Buses enabled. 

It has been designed to help users to understand more about the bus that’s on its way, by providing them with more information than has previously been available to them. This includes payment options accepted on the bus and links to the Covid-19 guidance you’ve published online.

Vehicles are automatically detected by Passenger Cloud from the Automatic Vehicle Location (or ‘Live Buses’) SIRI-VM feed. Once they appear, additional information can then be added to them or existing information edited in a new vehicle management area in Passenger Cloud.

Importantly in the current climate, each vehicle displays an indication of whether the vehicle is ‘Quiet’, ‘Moderate’ or ‘Busy’. This vehicle occupancy data is currently powered by two key sources. Crowdsourced data from users and, in the case of operators with Ticketer ETMs, data collected by the driver. These are both now live.

Where no data is available, we will show “Unknown” to users, who are then encouraged to help others by completing a simple form. There is also an option on this form for users to let us know the status of the wheelchair bay too. At this stage we are only collecting data on the wheelchair bay and analysing what is being sent to us by drivers via the Ticketer system. We are not yet displaying the status on the website, as it is critical that this is accurate for the users that need this information. 

We’re rolling out on the web first, as doing this enables us to release changes quickly. On the web, we don’t have to go through an app store review process which means we can release updates faster and change things more quickly if we need to.

We’re already working on an initial release for apps and will follow up with an update on iPhone and Android as soon as we are sure that what we’ve delivered on the web is useful for your customers.

If you haven’t already communicated the changes, we’ve put together a template press release that we hope helps. Feel free to use as much or as little of it in your communications both to customers and industry press.

Thank you for all your support and feedback on this update so far. It has taken a huge effort and we’re incredibly grateful for all of your input. If you have any questions at all, you know where we are.