Case study

Transport for London

Introducing new systems to improve quality of service

Transport for London (TfL) manages bus services across London and, as part of this, provides core infrastructure associated with running one of the largest bus fleets in the world, with nearly 10,000 vehicles.

This infrastructure supports voice communications, bus position determination, traffic light priority for buses, and information collation for contract management. TfL originally introduced much of this technology in the 1980s, and functionality has subsequently been added to the legacy systems. Since its introduction, much of the core technology used to implement this infrastructure has become obsolete and unreliable, resulting in poor quality of service to passengers, and lack of management information within TfL.

The question therefore arose of whether to continue fixing and upgrading the existing systems, or whether to introduce wholly new technology to meet the needs of the next 10-20 years. PA Consulting Group has been engaged by TfL at all stages of this process, and is currently working as part of the team managing the introduction of the new systems.