Context

The Passenger Transport Team at Leeds City Council operates on a massive scale. Led from the Westland Road Depot, the service manages over 900,000 journeys per year with an annual budget of roughly £10m for SEND transport alone.

However, the service faces the same pressures as many other metropolitan authorities:

• Rising demand: Requests for SEN transport have increased by approximately 20% over four years.
• Market restrictions: The availability of taxi and private hire vehicles has dropped considerably.
• Financial scrutiny: Budgets are tighter than ever.

Challenge

Before adopting QRoutes, the team relied on manual planning. Planners used their own deep knowledge of the local geography to schedule routes.

While this got the job done, it led to stagnation. Routes often remained similar year after year because manual planning didn’t allow time to test new options. As Dylan Owen, Application Manager, noted: “This resulted in routes which were always very similar and schedules which were not stretched or challenged.”

To handle the 1,300 SEN pupils, the council needed a way to break this pattern.

Stage 1: The shift to digital planning

Following recommendations from colleagues in Sheffield and Barnsley, Leeds moved to QRoutes.

The priority was ease of use. Peter Clifton, a system administrator for the team, built simple reports that allowed pupil data to be exported from their legacy system and imported straight into QRoutes via a CSV file.

Stage 2: Measuring success beyond money

Dylan wanted to ensure the trial was evaluated fairly. He argued that looking at costs alone was misleading because there are too many variables in transport pricing year-to-year.

Instead, he developed a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) focused on efficiency. He measured how the contracts performed at the end of the previous academic year and compared them strictly against the new routes generated for September. The focus was on vehicle utilisation and contract volume.

Outcome

The results vindicated the decision to move away from manual planning. By letting the software ‘stretch’ the schedules, the team achieved:

• A 12.5% reduction in the number of contracts used.
• A 5.84% increase in vehicle utilisation.

Beyond the metrics, the software changed the team’s working calendar. Because the automated planning was faster, the team could start the planning and tender process later in the summer than normal. This allowed them to wait for late applications and last-minute changes – factors that usually disrupt the planning effort – before finalising the routes.

Key results

• Efficiency: improved vehicle occupancy by 5.84%.
• Volume: Reduced the total number of required contracts by 12.5%.
• Agility: Enabled the team to plan later in the year, capturing last-minute pupil changes without the need for rework.