iRoute: routing by public transport for commercial organisations

The market for fleet management software is worth about $8bn a year (source: Berg Insight 2013); Vehicle Routing and Scheduling is an inherent part of such software, but is just for routing vehicles – it is for road use only. There is no equivalent multi-modal routing software for commercial use. We propose to develop a fully multi-modal routing software for commercial use by extending the feature set within our existing TravelTime routing platform. The opportunity is significant. There were 310 billion road miles travelled in GB in 2014 (Source: Dept. for Transport) and 80 billion of these miles (25%) were for commercial purposes - HGVs, vans and cars being used for business. iGeolise believe that c.5% of the total road miles could be switched to public transport (around 16 billion road miles). Clearly ‘switchable miles’ are not HGV miles, nor vans delivering or picking up goods or carrying heavy / bulky equipment – but it could be vans currently just carrying people to jobs, and cars conveying people to meetings where they are need little more than a laptop. For this to happen there are 3 pre-requisites; 1) Adequate public transport alternatives for the required commercial journey (which is why our estimates above are only for urban areas, where good public transport is generally available); 2) Continued development and imaginative deployment of the Internet of Things, and ICT (such as tablets and augmented reality to demonstrate products) so reducing the need to transport carrying bulky / heavy items; 3) And commercial routing software that is truly multi-modal and real-time. iRoute can be that software. iGeolise have already built the TravelTime platform that makes maps and data searchable by traveltime. It includes all transport modes (road, buses, trains, walking, cycling, ferries, trams …). The platform does 3 things. A) It can determine a travel time area from an origin (the area that can be reached within a given time using a given transport mode or modes. B) it ranks & sorts thousands of destinations by their travel time from an origin. C) it calculates the turn by turn, door to door route to each location, using all travel modes and returns the time, the true distance, and the travel cost to each. These 3 features are used by Zoopla, Countrywide and Foxtons (search for properties by their travel time from the office), and Jobsite (search for jobs within a commuting time), amongst many other clients. We propose developing iRoute by using our existing routing capability and adding the additional features required for commercial routing and scheduling. iRoute will be the equivalent of the best Vehicle Routing software but will include ALL transport modes. This will mean commercial organisations can route and schedule their staff using all transport modes and gain efficiencies by switching some of their road miles to public transport. In context HGVs drive nearly 16 billion miles a year - virtually the same as the van and car miles that could potentially be switched.