Andrew Dismore

Dial a Ride

Question No: 2594 / 2012

Andrew Dismore

Why has Dial a Ride invested in an expensive computer booking system which cannot be overridden by common sense so that 2 or 3 Dial a Ride vehicles, each capable of taking 6 or 8 passengers, arrive at the same time to pick up one client individually each, when two or more are neighbours or live near each other?

Written response from the Mayor

The Dial-a-Ride computerised booking and scheduling system has enabled the service to organise itself in a far more efficient and fair way than was previously the case when a ‘paper and pencil’ system was used at depots. Journey requests are now scheduled on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, ensuring equal access to journeys to members whether they are travelling to an individual or a group activity. It has led to record numbers of trips being delivered last year. Centralised booking and scheduling has enabled the service to record the most delivered trips in its 30 year history in 2010/11 (1.34m trips) and 2011/12 (1.37m trips).

While Dial-a-Ride tries to encourage members attending group activities to book through a single ‘group’ contact, to ensure consistency in the requested arrival and departure times, customers sometimes book separately for group activities, requesting different arrival and departure times. This can result in Dial-a-Ride allocating more buses than would have been necessary had the journey requests been co-ordinated through a single point of contact.

Dial-a-Ride can, and often does, manually ‘fine tune’ computer-generated schedules to maximise efficiency of its schedules where necessary such as to optimise deployment of a bus. The service also tries to encourage customers to identify suitable ‘group’ contacts where a number of members are all travelling to a particular activity to improve co-ordination of booking requests and minimise the number of buses that have to be allocated.