Case Study: Cardiff County Council achieves £200,000+ efficiency gains and optimised school transport with Ordnance Survey

Cardiff Council - Customer Case Study

Cardiff Council’s Schools and Lifelong Learning Service needed highly accurate walking-distance measurements to determine free school transport eligibility and more efficient ways to plan bus routes and school mail collections. To do this it worked with Ordnance Survey, using OS MasterMap (including the ITN and Topography Layers) alongside GIS tools such as MapInfo and RouteFinder and its Capita ONE pupil database to replace manual trundle-wheel and paper-map methods.

Ordnance Survey’s datasets were integrated into the council’s systems to model roads, footpaths and catchment areas, enabling walking routes accurate to school gates, faster entitlement decisions, more logical and adjustable bus routing, and redesigned mail delivery options. The council reports efficiency gains in the region of £200,000 (including potential courier savings of about £10,000 per year) and was able to fund higher-spec coaches from the savings delivered.

Cardiff County Council

Phil Peddle

Research and Information Team