Case Study: Gloucestershire County Council achieves £2m (40%) transport savings with Ordnance Survey mapping

Gloucestershire County Council - Customer Case Study

Gloucestershire County Council faced the challenge of taking on responsibility for concessionary bus travel while cutting its annual bus subsidy from £5 million to £3 million and with a 30% reduction in back-office transport staff. To make evidence-based decisions about which of 170 publicly supported services could be redesigned or withdrawn without harming access to education, health, employment and market towns, the council worked with Ordnance Survey using products such as OS MasterMap® Integrated Transport Network™ (ITN) Layer and multiple scale raster and street-view datasets to analyse service provision and accessibility.

Ordnance Survey’s mapping and accessibility analysis let the council plot all routes, run before-and-after 45-minute access comparisons, and model changes to concession start times. That insight supported a discretionary 9:30am concession for rurally isolated communities that avoided £300,000 in extra costs and enabled a redesigned network that delivered a £2,000,000 (40%) reduction in transport spend by awarding 95 amended contracts, redesigning or replacing 17 under-used routes with community transport, creating a hub-and-spoke network and encouraging operators to take on routes without subsidy.

Gloucestershire County Council

Philip Williams

Lead Commissioner