Ride, the new travel app for Nottingham and Derby, is being used by hundreds of people every day. Here, Jorgen Pedersen, the project’s technical lead, provides his latest update as we approach the six-month anniversary of its launch…

Sorry it’s take a little longer to get this update out to you all.  It’s been busy and I hope that some of the changes we have been making are noticeable.

But first some milestone news and what’s happened over the last month:

• We have blasted through 15,000 downloads about a month ago – which is massive so thank you all for your support and spreading what we are doing by word-of-mouth.
• We also have now issued more than 800,000 itineraries, which not only proves it being used, but that its being used in earnest.
• We had a visit from Heidi Alexander the Secretary of State for Transport (see above) who used Nottingham as an exemplar for public transport integration ahead of publishing the Government’s new national strategy. We were able to provide her with an update on Ride among other programmes
• In that Government document, Ride is identified as the ‘gold standard’ for these type of transport apps
• There was further BBC East Midlands Today coverage on Ride as part of their story on the Minister’s visit

But, to temper this, I am an advocate of complete transparency, and we understand that Ride isn’t perfect. We know that there is a long road ahead, and that as part of that journey Ride will improve, adapt and deliver new features, and functionality which will hopefully further support you, our customers.

So, what have we delivered in the last month or so, and what are we currently working on?

• We had an issue with some very complicated itineraries being presented from time to time. This has been fixed and unnecessarily complex and unlikely itineraries should no longer occur.
• We have added the transport providers’ name across the system. In the past it seemed to be a bit hit-or-miss as to whether the provider would be identified. It’s now shown prominently across the Ride app.
• We have defaulted fares to be adult fares. In the past this was defaulted to a student and we know this had caused a few people to inadvertently purchase the wrong ticket.
• There have been some updates to how driving licences are verified which has tightened-up verifications and removed the opportunity for fraud.
• We identified that at weekends Zigzag tickets were not being accepted – this has also been corrected.
• We spotted that micro-mobility modes were not being presented correctly seemingly to favour Lime Bikes. We looked into this and spotted a small error which has now been corrected – riding times should now be uniform across micro-mobility modes.
• We are doing quite a lot of work around Enterprise Car Clubs (ECC), which were not being properly accommodated. This is still a work in progress, but what you should start to see are ECC car-sharing options as part of a mixed-mode or private-mode solution. We are also in the process of being able to identify vehicle type (van, car), transmission type (manual, automatic) to make it easier to find, book and hire the vehicle you need.
• We are continuing to work on the NCT full-ticket integration with an estimated delivery date over the summer.
• We are continuing to work on a better process for identifying and choosing tickets for a specific itinerary. This is a large piece of work with lots of moving parts, but our solution is to make this as easy as possible as per the following flow…

So basically, from an itinerary, one only needs to press the Tickets button which will identify the tickets required for the itinerary from which the user can then purchase all tickets from a single button as well.

In light of the reasonably newly-established East Midlands Combined County Authority (EMCCA) we are starting to include Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire services into Ride.  You should see some of those starting to be included in the journey planner and real-time information screens within two weeks.