Road Safety Systems Ltd, a company specialising in GPS Vehicle Tracking and Fleet Management technology, with their Revelation Smart Vehicle Tracking, have conducted a study to find how much our daily commutes change when the schools go back.
Anecdotal evidence from the harried employee arriving late to the office despite leaving the house at exactly the same time hints that the roads change as soon as the kids go back to school but Revelation have used their technology to drill down and find out exactly why and how. The results were striking.
We looked through our fleet of test vehicles and retrieved random, anonymised data based on the fleet location, we examined the picture as a whole but also focussed on individual journeys that met certain criteria. We wanted to see how morning and evening commutes have been impacted across a spread of different road users journeys.
As a typical example of the data, a commuter in Liverpool making an urban commute across the city took 43 minutes to travel 18 miles on Wednesday 27th of August. Fast forward a week and the same journey took 58 minutes and their idling time over their daily commutes went up from 7 minutes to 17.
On the motorways the impact is lessened but still marked. A company director in Reading, Berkshire has a fairly long 45 mile round trip each day. They use a combination of A-roads and motorway, in the final week of August his commute took 48 minutes. A week later he takes 10 minutes extra each way and is stationary for 6 times as long.
The most stark example we came across was a small corporate shuttle bus operating in London, it takes exactly the same route every day. Last week the daily routes, morning and evening commutes, took 3 hours and 49 minutes. This week it is taking 4 hours 24 minutes. Idling time for this vehicle shot up from 11 minutes to over half an hour.
Across all the vehicles surveyed we saw :
- Journey time increase by 23%
- average speed drop by 7 miles per hour
- Idling time more than treble in the space of a single week.
This gridlock doesn’t just impact drivers, buses too are trapped on the busier roads meaning employees turning to public transport arrive later too. One commuter we surveyed reported arriving 10 minutes later each day this week despite catching the same bus.
Conversely cyclists journeys are affected less so, increased cycle lane means that they can proceed relatively unscathed by the increase in road use and some cyclists report the stationary traffic actually easier and safer to navigate than when the cars, buses and lorries are moving on or around the speed limit.
“This was something we found immensely interesting” said James Savage, one of Revelation Systems directors “We all know that the roads clog up but with our vehicle tracking systems we are extremely well placed to see just how much. The results we quite an eyebrow raiser”
For more information on this survey or for details on how GPS based Fleet Management Systems monitor vehicles progress and can provide efficiencies for fleets just call Revelation Smart Vehicle Tracking on 01695 370 018
