Arriva blog: Making the most of real-time data to maintain social distancing

As operators, we have a responsibility to keep our customers and our people safe, whilst keeping our networks open for essential journeys. Giving customers confidence, and building trust, is going to be key as other lockdown restrictions are eased in coming weeks and months.

At Chiltern Railways, using data – much of it in real time – has been invaluable in shaping our decision making, particularly in addressing one of the most significant concerns for customers: maintaining social distancing.

We’ve been monitoring our ticket barriers every 15 minutes, and conducting manual passenger counts, which has enabled us to ensure that we continue to maintain social distancing on our trains. As a result, we have flexed our services in line with demand, including adding extra carriages, amending timetables and running additional trains.

Listening to our customers, and acting on their feedback, has also been important. At Chiltern Railways, we listened to the feedback from key workers and made some minor adjustments to our timetables. This helped police officers in Oxford, healthcare workers near Warwick and Covid-19 scientists in London to get to their places of work on time. We have also surveyed a wider group of customers and are making changes on the back of their feedback, particularly around social distancing.

My hope is that coronavirus will reinforce some of the changes already underway on the railway before this pandemic started. It was important before coronavirus for operators to be responsive to customer needs. But to run a safe railway during a global pandemic, I would argue that data driven decision making, action focused goals and agile thinking, are now essential components in building customer trust.

The latest information on the actions we have been taking to support our customers and our people is available on the Chiltern Railways website.