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Submitted by Mike Grenville on Fri, 23 Dec 2005 17:21 |
Train, tube and bus companies in the UK are starting to realise the potential for mobile as an information channel. Kizoom's bus and train times SMS and WAP service is expecting Boxing Day to be one of the busiest days of the year again for one of the busiest mobile travel information services in the UK.
The mobile travel information service from Kizoom, which uses mBlox’s mobile transaction network, is ready for the busiest day of the year for travel information by mobile phone - Boxing Day. The combination of the holiday and first day of the sales means that many shoppers will be turning to their mobiles to spend as much time in the shops and not waste it hanging around at bus and train stations.
On average, waiting for a bus or train and other time spent queuing for tickets within stations, walking to or from platforms and changing between journey stages, accounts for a third of the total journey time for rail journeys and a fifth of the total journey time for bus journeys.
Malcolm Vernon, Business Development Director at Kizoom, said, “All the traveller needs to do is text one of the simple short codes and they can receive a journey plan, information on how services are running, or even a tube map within a few seconds. Best of all, most of the services are free.â€
Train Tracker Text Short Code
"The busiest phone in the country is the national rail enquiries number 08457 484950" said Vernon " and spent a lot of time to get the same number, 484950, as a short code across mobile operators. T-mobile and 3 have not yet made it available but we hope that will happen before too much longer. With Virgin Mobile using T-Mobile for its MVNO, this means that Virgin Mobile customers can't get access to Virgin trains information by SMS yet".
"It was hard to make it work easily for the user," said Vernon "but by monitoring actual usage we learnt which typos to ignore and to make the system reflect real life usage such as which station routing passengers use to build connections. The system uses three letter short codes for station names that are embedded in the SMS response so that users can learn them to make their text message shorter next time."
For example sending the text message: dep brighton to victoria OR dep btn to vic
gives the text message reply
dep BTN@1150 to VIC
1149 Victoria:OK
1219 Victoria
1249 Victoria
1319 Victoria
1349 Victoria
Currently about 1,300 SMS train time requests are sent out to mobiles every day in addition to about 17,000 daily enquiries to the rail WAP site. Rail Enquiries are currently promoting the SMS service with cards at railway offices and will also be printing instructions on the back of tickets. Launched at beginning of 2005, Vernon reckons that a lot of people use the 'train tracker' text service who wouldn't bother to ring rail enquiries as the service provides real time updates.
The National Rail Enquiries website offers a text message simulator for the service:
www.nationalrail.co.uk/traintrackertext
Transport For London
In London there are about 40,000 people signed up to SMS to delays in their daily commute. However with 850,000 daily tube commuters there is some way to go before there are enough people using it to make a real impact on journeys during disruption. During the July bombs in London would have been an ideal time to make use of the system and Kizoom got all mobile numbers ready to use on the day but the police would only allow messages to be sent out from 5pm when most people were aware what was happening. However following a post incident review, it is likely that SMS will be used more effectively next time there is a major disruption to London's transport.
As well as commuter alerts, Transport For London (TFL) offer a number of mobile services also run by Kizoom.
For example the TFL journey planner by SMS: By sending A to B to 60TFL (shortcode 60835), travellers can get a text message reply with journey details (see right). "We tried to make it very forgiving for typos," said Vernon "for example for a journey from St Paul's could be written st, saint, pauls, paul's etc.
The service came into its own at the recent Live8 concert in London. With so many people wanting to get home at once tube stations soon became over crowded. Kizoom was able to deal with over 5,000 requests that afternoon. Based on whether the requested journey was to travel north or south, the responses directed concert goers to the best station that was actually open on the day.
Another service is tube map designed for the phone type that can be downloaded by texting 'tubemap' to 60tfl. By checking the phone type automatically before sending it, the map can be sure to be readable on the actual device.
www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/mobile
Buses Start Moving Text
As well as trains and tubes, buses around the country are also seeing the potential for improved customer information as well as cost savings. There are 315,000 bus stops nationally and already timetable information can be accessed for 250,000 of them. However so far only 5,000 have the information of how to access the service on the bus stop. Already the service handles 20,000 text message request a month and it has been growing at 60% since August and 20% since September 2005.
"We found that hardly anyone uses the service for more than 6 or 7 stops" said Vernon "so people can soon learn the codes for their bus stops. For the buses we have used an SMS shortcode that is easy for fingers to learn - 84268 - as the fingers go clockwise round the keypad on most phones" he said.
Usage numbers should soon see a big boost with the serious efforts underway by bus companies to make travellers more aware of how to use their mobiles. In Wales, a team of three men are driving round the country for next year putting information on 17,000 bus stops; in Nottingham the text number is painted on back of buses; in Manchester an orange sticker is being added when timetable are replaced at bus stops; in Swindon the local newspaper published a special supplement with all the bus stop codes.
Still More Potential
Vernon said that SMS is changing the economics of the bus industry. "Tenders for bus information services now say that they will only put electronic 3 line displays at busy stops and use SMS to provide information for the others" said Vernon. "With each bus shelter 3 line display costing £3,000 to install plus connection fees and maintenance, text messaging can offer a significant saving."
Mobile has always been well suited to providing travel information, but until now the travel industry has been slow to take advantage of it. Now at last more and more genuinely useful services are starting to come online as full blown projects, not just pilots. "There is still a lot of things that SMS can be used for with a genuine business and personal benefit" said Conrad Langridge Account Manager at mBlox
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