Incubator in Focus - High hopes for train capacity data

An app that guides you away from the crowds and to a less crowded train. Sound interesting? Fresh from the Future Transport Innovation Incubator, one project team is working on helping 3rd party app developers do just that.

The Future Transport Innovation Incubator Program is bringing staff together from across the cluster to deliver solutions that help our processes and our customers, and we want to share with you this recent success story of the program.

Picture an app that guides you away from the crowds and to a less crowded train during busy travel periods.

Abhishek Gupta, Project Manager, Future Transport within Digital Products & Services explains how this might work.

“In a similar way to how Google lets you know how busy a road is before you travel on it, or how full a restaurant is before you book a table, we wanted to see if we could offer customers a solution to improve their journey time, the accessibility of the trains and their comfort levels” he said.

While the data used for this technology is currently in its infancy, it has the potential to do much more than work within apps that provide indications about train occupancy.

The data could, in future, potentially inform app users how busy a station and platform is, let them know where best to stand on the platform to get a seat, how many available seats there are in a carriage and even if that carriage has luggage storage availability or bathroom facilities.

Suzanne Duffy, Team Leader on the project is excited by the opportunity.

“The team has worked together over many months to bring this program of work together. We now need to discuss feedback from app developers before we proceed to testing, pilot and potential customer release."

Suzanne has been a passionate supporter of the Incubator Program in helping to make this solution a reality.

“This has been a real passion of mine, and I’ve really enjoyed working with everyone across the cluster.”

Jacinta Hargan, Director Future Transport, said this project is an example of some of the great work that staff are doing in the Incubator.

“It’s great that this agile environment is able to produce this kind of outcome. This project is harnessing the technology already available to provide a solution that makes people’s journey’s that much simpler... and best of all, it’s harnessing the talent of our own employees. They came up with the idea, they nurtured it, and now they’re implementing it. It’s a great development opportunity!” she said.

Further information

If you have questions about the program email futuretransportincubator@transport.nsw.gov.au