A.0 Appendix A- Travel Despatch Centres: Costs and Benefits
A.1 The cost of providing the TDC function is often a major determination in the overall cost of providing the DRT service. Schemes with a dedicated high technology call centre where more than one person is employed will almost certainly cost more than a 'low tech' scheme using, for example, a taxi booking office.
A.2 As an example of the cost of a TDC, for the year 2000/01 the total cost of operating the Wiltshire Wigglybus services using three vehicles was £287,000 of which £31,500 (11%) was call centre costs. In another location a bid for Rural Bus Challenge funding in 2001 estimated the cost of a TDC to be around £8,000 per bus per year.
A.3 A key route to ensure the cost effectiveness of specialist TDCs is through the development of joint TDCs - operating a variety of different schemes through one call centre. This has occurred in the cases of the Wiltshire Wigglybus (initially through joint working with the Ambulance Service, and then with a neighbouring DRT scheme in Gloucester), and with the Nexus U-Call service in Newcastle, where the call centre managing Nexus' dial-a-ride service also manages the trip requests for an urban DRT scheme, and a rural scheme in Northumberland.
A.4 Another concern over the centralisation of TDCs is an emerging view that a remote call centre is unpopular with users. This was particularly noted in a review of the Wiltshire Wigglybus. The perceived lack of local knowledge and involvement when the Wiltshire service began to be scheduled from a site in Gloucestershire, was thought to be both unfriendly to the user and detrimental to the quality of service. Having said that, the scheduling function has now been relocated to a base in Exeter (Devon) and Wiltshire County Council reports a significant improvement in scheduling performance and user satisfaction. Furthermore, a local base is no guarantee of an acceptable service, as was shown by the need to switch Wigglybus scheduling away from Wiltshire Ambulance Service. It may be significant that the Exeter base is also responsible for operating the South West Traveline information service.
A.5 It is evident from previous experience that small numbers of vehicles and small levels of passenger volumes cannot support a dedicated TDC on their own. Small stand-alone operations that are not able to combine the TDC function with any other work are best operated on a 'low tech' (though often incorporating GIS functions) basis by a taxi operator or similar which has local experience and can use personnel that would already be present in any event for their commercial operations.
A.6 The key is to defray the fixed costs of the TDC over a wider operation. (Nexus has achieved this by virtue of the scale of its own services with 24 vehicles).
A.7 Elsewhere, Lincolnshire Council sells TDC resources to other authorities, on a similar basis to the use of the commercial centre based in Gloucester by Wiltshire. This does, however, raise issues of local knowledge.
A.8 Others have tried combining TDCs with other forms of transport, most notably the Ambulance Service. However some have experienced problems due to differences in technology, working practices and hours of operation between the two services. The Wigglybus experience noted above is a case in point.
A.9 It is clear therefore from experience elsewhere that a large operation is required to warrant a dedicated call centre / TDC, preferably incorporating a range of different services to offer economies of scale. Due to the limited evidence available and variety of parameters upon which the financial sustainability of TDC depends (subsidy levels, patronage, number of services, methods of financing TDC etc) it is, however, impossible to offer any clear advice on the number of services required to be combined within a TDC to make it sustainable.
A.10 However, when centralising the TDC for any given DRT service, research and experience indicates that the consideration of the following key issues is essential:
- Centralised TDCs with advanced booking systems are expensive to install and maintain, and are unlikely to offer significant benefits for smaller or single operations.
- The joint working required to centralise the co-ordination of services often has to overcome significant cultural, institutional and legal barriers to ensure success.
- A dedicated TDC also provides the opportunity to undertake 'transport brokerage' activities in order to achieve more cost effective vehicle utilisation.
- Local knowledge (of routes, services, users and operators) can, in the perception of users and potentially in reality, play a key part in the ability to efficiently schedule services, and this may be lost in centralisation.
- The remoteness of a booking centre can act as a barrier to use for some users.