Nimble transport strategy for Manchester Government

Site location
UK

Year
2014

Designing the future of public transportation for the City of Manchester Government.

Challenge
Public transport in Manchester is unreliable, especially the Bus system and citizens needed for a more convenient and trustworthy system to travel. Transport for Greater Manchester challenged us to build future scenarios and find a potential solution.

Insight
People will just want to find the more convenient and flexible way of going from point A to point B (Scenario of Vehicle Usability over Car Ownership).

Solution
Nimble is an RDF technology driven solution that allows Manchester citizens to optimize their time and way of traveling from A to B in the city of Manchester.

How might we change people’s love affair with their cars and get them to use Manchester Public Transport to get into the city center? A crowdsourced data gathering and analyzing solution to build a mixed-model transport digital platform that will provide the best, most personalized route, becoming a lifestyle platform and helping Manchester and its citizens to become greener and healthier. We prototyped the technology to make sure it worked and are proud of one of the client's comments: "we've just had a penny dropped moment".

Transport for Greater Manchester picked our idea from all 7 presented. Nimble is a data gathering & visualization digital platform to end people's love affair with their cars and embrace a mixed model of transportation.
Nimble is a digital platform that recommends the most convenient route from point A to B in real time. The data is Crowdsourced through RFID technology in bus stops, a carpooling tag system and other open source APIs so the data gathering, interpreting and visualization can start today.

Through differentiated phases:
1st: Initial data gathering through RFID tech.
2nd: Platform launch / Carpooling RFID-enabled sticker.
3rd: Community Building.
4th: Platform Maturity.

We showed how the future could start today by using a very simple, inexpensive technology that has existed since the 70s, RFID. The very first step would be to enable all bus stations in Manchester with RFID tags that can be activated with your phone and crowdsource bus schedules, making the bus system more reliable, so people consider dropping their cars to go into the city. Then the carpooling RFID-enabled sticker will continue this data gathering while providing alternative modes of transport as the system grew.

Process
We applied Futures Design methods such as weak signals detection, playground design, world building and backcasting in order to anticipate preferable futures and work towards making it possible through prototyping solutions that would be optimal in that future scenario.

We decided to focus on the problem, redefine it and spend most of our time researching Manchester's transportation, future people's behavior, unmet needs, gaps/waste, and looking into the future of transportation. We also researched available technology today and tomorrow and how the internet of things will work. In this case we really focused on understanding the issue and the possibilities of technology, which really helped us during the idea development phase as we knew what was realistic and what wasn't.