Data-Driven Public Transport - aarsrapport2023.ruter.no

If you’ve heard us give a presentation or appear in a podcast in 2023, chances are you’ve heard us talk about data. How the countless gadgets around us continuously pick up information from their surroundings, the enormous volumes of data they produce together – and the opportunities that open up for those who can acquire data, analyze the patterns in them, and utilize the insights.

This development affects all sectors. Not least the way companies and public actors, through new knowledge, can adapt their products and services to the end user’s needs. Public transport is also being transformed by data.

Today, data streams can enable you to track the real-time location of a tram, give you an estimate of how crowded the subway will be at a given time, and tell you how many electric scooters are currently available at the stop where you’re getting off.
In the years to come, public transport services could be expanded with transport services that come and pick you up where you are, and vehicles that can drive themselves. The positioning and route selection of the vehicles will be based on data and will be continuously re-planned in real-time to ensure that the vehicle chooses the most efficient route even when new bookings come in. Your digital interaction with public transport will become even more intuitive and effortless than today.
In the transport system of the future, all vehicles and infrastructure will be digitally connected and coordinated to utilize the transport capacity in the system even more efficiently and safely than today. If you want, Ruter, with the help of artificial intelligence, can closely follow you in your daily life and facilitate the everyday logistics for your entire household, in the form of both planning and execution of transport. No one needs to own their own car anymore; public transport has an efficient and attractive travel solution for you no matter where or when you want to go.

Ruter's Information and Coordination Center (IOSS)

In a large room at Dronningens gate 40, you’ll find Ruter’s Information and Coordination Center – our data center and the digital brain of the region’s public transport system. Here, we maintain an overview of Ruter’s entire transport system in real-time. Where is a particular bus right now? How full is it? And is it on schedule?

Many unpredictable events occur in the Oslo region traffic every single day. Something as simple as an incorrectly parked car can, in the worst case, cause an entire bus line to fall behind schedule. Data access from each vehicle in our system gives us the overview we need to be able to contact our operator companies and immediately implement mitigating measures, such as an extra bus, before customers even notice anything.

A man in a blue and orange shirt works at a computer in a modern office with other colleagues around him.

Photo: Ruter As / Redink, Oda Hveem

Artificial Intelligence

Data is produced in large quantities. To be able to analyze data continuously and benefit from the aggregated information, a much higher processing capacity is required than what a human possesses. We need artificial intelligence (AI).

2023 was the year when AI really became a topic of conversation for everyone, with the launch of language models like ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI. The possibilities may seem enormous, and they are. Not least when it comes to managing a complex public transport system and making it easier for people to get around in our region.

Ruter’s data science department has been exploring and utilizing AI for several years to improve public transport and provide our customers with even better travel experiences. By the end of 2023, we had implemented over 20 different projects and development initiatives within AI – one of the highest numbers of AI projects in the public sector.

Some AI Projects We Worked On in 2023

Sentiment Analysis

Customer feedback on buses, stops, and other things provides us with valuable insights that we can use to make improvements to our services. Ruter uses AI to review and analyze the content of large volumes of written messages from our customers, and present the aggregated insights on a digital map. This allows us to quickly and easily get an overview of where our customers are satisfied, and where they are less satisfied.

Some feedback is polite, others very harsh. That’s why we’ve trained AI to understand the tone of customer feedback. The digital map displays circles of different colors, where red indicates high dissatisfaction. Ruter’s customer support can now identify geographical clusters of users who have contacted us with just a few clicks, and measures can be focused on lines and geographical areas where there are currently the most challenges.

Fleet Management

If you have booked a trip with an on-demand service, such as Age-Friendly Transport, we want to be there as quickly as possible. How quickly we can pick you up depends, among other things, on how many vehicles are available nearby. With artificial intelligence, we can analyze historical travel data and predict in which geographical areas the next travel requests are most likely to come from, and make sure to position available vehicles there in advance. This means the driver has a short distance to drive when a booking comes in. There are several advantages to this: You don’t have to wait long to be picked up, and the vehicles don’t have to use fuel on unnecessarily long trips.

AI-assisted fleet management is still only being tested and has not yet been implemented in Ruter’s on-demand services. But in the more flexible public transport system of the future, AI will play an important role in coordinating large numbers of vehicles and travel requests on an ongoing basis.

RuterGPT

In August 2023, we launched RuterGPT, a large language model that we developed entirely ourselves. It’s trained on a massive dataset of Norwegian text and code, from the National Library’s texts to Ruter’s staff handbook. One goal of developing RuterGPT is to improve customer experiences by offering more intelligent and user-friendly information and service in public transport. Over time, we want to be able to use RuterGPT for a variety of purposes, such as providing our customers with detailed information about travel routes, prices, and delays based on the traffic situation, or efficiently handling general customer inquiries about tickets and refunds.

The Ruter App

The public transport system in the Oslo region is large and complex, with a large number of vehicles and vessels traveling across cities and municipalities. But you, as a traveler, don’t have to deal with this complexity. You just need to decide where you want to go, and the Ruter app will take care of the rest for you.

The Ruter app knows our entire service, and through continuous data streams, it also knows the status of each of our lines right now. This allows the app to give you the best travel suggestion right when you’re about to travel. And preferably a travel suggestion in line with how you typically prefer to get around.

Since the Ruter app was launched, it has been continuously further developed to provide our customers with increasingly better digital travel experiences. During 2023, we have made many large and small changes to the app. Many of them have been technical adjustments that you may not have noticed immediately, but you’ve probably seen some of these:

Micromobility: In 2023, electric scooters from Voi, Ryde and Tier, as well as city bikes in Oslo, became available to Ruter’s customers in the Ruter app.
New travel search: We have improved the user interface for travel search by moving the search field from the top of the app and into the drawer. This makes the search more ergonomic for larger phones by having the field within thumb reach. Furthermore, it has become possible to define both from and to from the first step, so that you don’t have to start from your own position. It has also become easier for travelers to choose whether they want to find journeys from A to B, or just see departures from a specific stop.
Save journey: The app has been given the ability to save future journeys, so you can follow them and get quick access to details in the future. This allows you to get updated information about changes to upcoming journeys faster.
Better information on cancellations: Canceled departures are now much more clearly visible in the app. Canceled journeys get their own mark in the app, so that travelers quickly notice it without having to go into the details of the journey.

Reis - A Flexible Ticket Product

Data-based development of public transport also opens up new forms of tickets and payment. In April 2023, we rolled out the pilot project Reis, a flexible ticket solution that gives you a personal discount based on how often you travel. The ticket solution is perfect for those who travel 1-3 days a week or don’t know exactly how much they will travel in the coming period. Reis is based on technology that enables dynamic pricing, meaning it is possible to adjust prices according to customers’ or the market’s varying needs.

Throughout 2023, we have closely monitored the use of Reis. The discount scheme has been very popular, and particularly pleasing is the satisfaction in the main target group (people who travel to work 1-3 times a week), where early surveys showed that as many as 75% stated that they are satisfied with the scheme. At the end of the year, we saw that the demand for public transport had increased by 1-2%, while car traffic across the toll points along the city border had decreased by about 1 percentage point. Our assessment is that Reis is one of the reasons for these changes in travel habits.

The pilot project was originally planned to end on April 15, 2024, but our owners in the City of Oslo and Akershus County Municipality have decided to continue the Reis scheme until the end of 2024. This gives us the opportunity to continue to gain experience with dynamic pricing.

A teenage girl and an older man examine a smartphone together at a bus stop, with cars passing in the background.

Photo: Ruter As / Hampus Lundgren

Separate Company for Digital Development

We believe that in the future, the Ruter app and other digital user interfaces will only become more and more important. For people to consistently choose sustainable travel options over the private car, public transport throughout Norway must offer high-quality digital customer experiences. New solutions must be developed continuously and implemented quickly, and they must be built on a robust and well-functioning backend system.

This is the background for our decision in 2023 to separate Ruter’s digital development department into a separate company, Tet Digital AS, which will be able to work even faster with digital development and serve Norway’s entire public transport sector with attractive solutions.

Innovation Award to Ruter

In November, Ruter wins the Research Council of Norway’s Innovation Award for its use of artificial intelligence. According to the CEO of the Research Council, Mari Sundli Tveit, Ruter impressively demonstrates the opportunities that lie in the digital economy, customer focus, and artificial intelligence.

Two women and a man talking in an office corridor, a woman laughing while the man gestures animatedly, a small table with a pen and a cup between them.

In the picture, Ruter's IT Director, Terje Storhaug, is being interviewed by NRK Stor-Oslo about the prize. Photo: Ruter As / Øystein Dahl Johansen