Steer Davies Gleave is extremely pleased to have been awarded the ‘Excellence in Travel Information and Marketing’ award in this year’s edition of the London Transport Awards. The prestigious ceremony was held on Thursday night at the Lancaster London Hotel, and recognises companies and individuals who are leading the way in making a real difference to transport across the city of London.
Steer Davies Gleave was recognised for the design and development of the Rugby World Cup Journey Planner, commissioned by England Rugby 2015 to support the transport operations and communication activities of the Rugby World Cup 2015.
The tournament, deemed the most successful Rugby World Cup to date, used 13 venues spread across 11 different cities and saw an attendance of over 2.5 million fans. Due to its nature, with increased hospitality and media areas in place, the normal transport operations had to be changed at each venue. This involved widespread alterations to car parking, public transport and park and ride services. With matches held on different days of the week and with kick-off times ranging from midday to 8pm, spectator transport demand was anything but normal.
Given this complexity, the event organiser, England Rugby 2015, recognised the benefit in developing a World Cup specific journey planner that would help inform users of their travel options in the build-up to the tournament, and provide travel guidance on match days.
About the journey planner:
England Rugby 2015 did a great job of bringing together the data on the planned transport operations for each individual match from key stakeholders, including transport operators and venue transport managers. Our team worked closely with England Rugby 2015 to ensure that this data was incorporated into the journey planner’s database and blended with other open source data sets (e.g. scheduled public transport data, live transport data feeds) to create the journey planner’s routing engine.
When users planned their journeys they were presented with a set of journey options that automatically took account of road closures, exclusive shuttle bus services, dedicated walking routes and parking locations. The journey options and results were accompanied with helpful messages that were devised by ER2015’s travel demand management team (e.g. to encourage users to book park and ride facilities in advance, or to warn them that particular routes would be busy at certain times).
The journey planner afforded ER2015 the opportunity to influence when users arrived at matches by setting default arrival times. Additionally, journey planner results could be ordered based on the transport plan for the individual venues (for some venues, public transport was the key focus, whereas for others, park and ride was of greater importance). These features, combined with the ability to provide targeted travel demand management messages meant that the journey planner was a key tool in supporting ER2015 in applying their integrated transport plan effectively.
The journey planner was very well used throughout the Rugby World Cup. Around 500,000 users generated 600,000 journey plans. Surveys conducted by England Rugby 2015 after each match showed how 90% of the users consistently rated the journey planner as being useful, very useful or extremely useful.
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