Thank you to Jeremy Branscombe, a planner at Warwickshire County Council, who flagged use of a ‘Private Road’ in a solution returned by QRoutes recently.
Ordnance Survey (OS) Maps list approximately 30% of roads as ‘private’, including school driveways. So, thanks to Jeremy’s discovery, we are now in the process of updating QRoutes to check for further flags in OS Maps which label a road as ‘gated’ to make sure that roads that are not passable are not included in solutions.
While QRoutes can do in minutes what might take a planner days, planners and their expertise are still at the heart of the process. And this goes far beyond sanity checking automated results.
QRoutes enables planners to test solutions by rescheduling with different parameters. For example
“What if we change the maximum ride time to 65 minutes?”
“What if we use fewer, bigger vehicles?”
“What if we use vehicles from this depot instead of that one?”
The ability to quantify the impact of potential changes puts also planners in a stronger position when it comes to justifying those changes (should they be implemented) to stakeholders who might otherwise be resistant.
In other words, QRoutes gives planners the power to delve deeper into the problems they are solving to deliver better solutions with broader benefits for everyone involved.
We want to hear from you
If you’ve got a suggestion on how to improve QRoutes, please get in touch. Or better still, come along to our User Group Workshop on Wednesday 21st June. This event is an opportunity for users, managers and product developers to get together to share experiences and ideas. It is also a chance to discuss strategic possibilities for collaborating to develop improved ways to manage trip data and routing solutions.
The QRoutes User Group is being held on Wednesday 21st June at (Milton Keynes). To reserve your place, get in touch now
