Le Jeune – ROUTES – LONDON TRANSPORTS COMPUTERISED ENQUIRY SYSTEM 1995

Description

ROUTES (Rail Omnibus Underground Travel Enquiry System) is London Transport’s computerised travel enquiry database and journey planner designed to give Telephone Enquiry Bureau staff and Travel Information Centre officers rapid, consistent answers to any multi-modal journey in Greater London. Developed by EDS-Scicon for £3.5m and due for full commissioning in summer 1995, ROUTES combines Megadyne PARIS routing software, an Oracle database, GIS mapping, and document imaging to hold timetables, fares, ticketing, operator contacts, geolocated stops, and points of interest. It supports personalised itineraries (up to five interchanges), walking links, user preferences, real‑time disruption flags, and fast response times (≈2s simple, ≈12s complex). The project responds to rising enquiry demand, network fragmentation and privatisation, and promises ~17% extra call-handling capacity, with revenue from generated journeys justifying costs. ROUTES integrates electronic data feeds, reduces paper reference use, and anticipates extensions: broader internal use, public access terminals, printed outputs, and links to Countdown, smartcards and other real‑time services. Comparable systems exist in the US, France and the Netherlands.