Tower Hamlets London Borough Council
Tower Hamlets covers just over 8 square miles of the East End of London. This
covers one of the most diverse and also one of the most deprived areas of the
country. With a population of over 200,000 people from all ethnic groups, this
produces a very varied requirement for social transport.
The non public transport requirements of the Borough are provided by in-house
managed vehicles. These vehicles provide services for vulnerable adults and
Special Educational Needs children, with additional runs providing access to
swimming pools for mainstream schools mostly during the middle of the day.
The Borough services cover in excess of 600 thousand kilometres a year using
mostly 16 seat wheelchair adapted vehicles, plus a few large multi seat busses.
The Transport Department who provide these services pride themselves on
providing a professional cost effective service. The service department has
achieved BSI 2001, Charter Mark and the highest level assessment from the Audit
Commission.
According to Lee Perry the operations manager, the service enhancements have
been due to the implementation of a number of innovative decisions. Staff
training has been high on the priority list along with the introduction of new
vehicles and technology to both manage the vehicle schedules and provide
location information, both planned and actual.
The route to successful transport management is knowing
your clients and each of their needs, followed closely by knowing what
resources are available in order to fulfil these needs. Tower Hamlets
have installed the TranSys Transport Management application from KL2;
this along with GPS vehicle tracking provides close control of both the
needs and the resources. The availability of all relevant information in
one easy to get at location is a great advantage to the department says
Lee Perry.
The KL2 TranSys system provides a depository for all information
related to both the clients, their needs and the departmental resources
available. The system provides the facility to create routes with the
resources available (vehicles/drivers/escorts).
Once created these routes will automatically produce daily collect and deliver
round manifests taking into account the varied transport needs of each of the
clients.
The system provides dynamic information that may be required in
order to respond to a client query, this information is now being further
enhanced by the addition of real time tracking information from the onboard GPS
receivers. This not only provides instantaneous information about a particular
vehicle but is also used to provide statistical information about the history of
each route compared with its planned schedule.
Tower Hamlets have over 500 child clients that have been assessed as eligible
for Special Needs Transport the majority of these require daily transport to a
variety of special and mainstream schools. A few clients are transported further
a field in order to attend residential schools.