As a performance manager, you care about overall network reliability, contract performance, and passenger experience. If a bus is not meeting its scheduled distance targets, it’s likely not reaching the stops it’s meant to arrive at. Let down by buses that don’t arrive, your passengers are frustrated and losing faith in your services.
Understanding the distance your buses cover is also crucial to performance reporting and understanding whether you are compliant with contract requirements. Lost mileage can lead to financial penalties and make your operation less profitable.
To tackle these problems and improve service reliability, the new distance reporting feature in Mosaiq Insights tracks the distance your buses run and whether they hit their scheduled targets.
You can see how much ground your buses are covering at a glance with simple charts; filter by services and operators; and view distance run over time so you can confidently understand when and where reliability is dropping – and make the right fixes.
Lost mileage (also referred to as lost kilometres) is the distance your buses have been scheduled to run but have not actually travelled.
It’s an important measure of the reliability of your bus network, and is also a key cause of financial penalties.
Note: In Mosaiq, we define “lost mileage” as the distance your buses have been scheduled to run but have not actually travelled within revenue service.
However, the term used for the distance scheduled but not travelled can vary between operator and country.
All of these terms refer to situations in which the ultimate outcome is decreased reliability and a deficit between scheduled distance and actual distance travelled.
Trips are often not run due to operator shortages. For example, post-COVID, some routes in Baltimore, Maryland, saw 1 in 5 scheduled trips simply not run.
When a trip is cut short or never started, the gap between buses on the route suddenly grows. There are more passengers at the stop by the time the next bus arrives, meaning that bus then becomes overloaded and slow, creating a “bunching” cascade. This is common on high-frequency routes in cities like New York, where more than 50% of frequent bus lines are delayed due to bunching.
Lost mileage can have significant social and economic consequences, contributing to inequality. Unreliable bus networks can cost people their jobs, and limit education and healthcare access. Commuters also absorb a ‘time tax’, meaning they need to get to bus stops earlier to avoid missing their bus – something people with private vehicles don’t have to do.
Lost mileage also has financial consequences. In the UK, the traffic commissioner can block you from running an unreliable service – or any services at all. The commissioner can also fine you, proportional to the number of vehicles in your fleet, and you may be required to spend money on improving the services or compensating passengers. In the US, the San Diego MTS fines contractors $1,000 each time they inaccurately report missed mileage or fail to report a missed trip.
Poor reliability also impacts your funding chances. In the US, agencies receiving federal funding must report service delivery data to the National Transit Database (NTD). Reduced Vehicle Revenue Miles (VRM) may affect funding allocation.
All in all, poor reliability sets you up for the “reliability death spiral”, where trips are missed, passengers abandon route, ridership falls, funding is cut, and you see more missed trips as a result.
Day-to-day, you’re grappling with manual reporting and incomplete data. Together, these lead to a lack of network insight: it’s hard to tell which services and operators are meeting or falling short of target.
It’s nearly impossible to know where to make changes in the network for the best impact, or to report on your performance to stakeholders.
Designed to solve these problems, distance reporting supports many of your key workflows, including validating performance, meeting contractual requirements, and keeping operators accountable.
With new distance reporting, you can:
By using distance charts (actual run vs scheduled) you’ll immediately see when buses aren’t meeting their scheduled distance targets. Once you’ve identified a problem, you can act quickly and confidently to improve reliability and meet contract compliance – without simply putting more buses on the road.
To better diagnose your distance issues, you can filter by operator or service. This helps you better understand operational efficiency and make targeted interventions for maximum impact. You can also use this data to have evidence-based discussions with operators, improving accountability.
Distance reporting is also a useful tool when you are seeking to understand how performance has been impacted by timetable changes, driver shortages, and other disruptions.
You can view distance analytics in a few ways in the new reporting function:
These simple charts and table additions will allow more effective performance reporting. You’ll feel more confident reporting to authorities and funding bodies, and have a clearer understanding of how you’re performing relative to contract requirements.
If you have a target set out in your contract for actual distance run compared to schedule, then you can monitor this in Mosaiq. By default, the target will be 95% of scheduled distance. This is a common target in the industry, but some contracts are evolving to be stricter. For example, Bus Éireann in Ireland moved from a 5% maximum lost kilometre rate (2017–2018) to a stricter 2% maximum lost rate from 2020 onwards.
If your target is different from 95%, you can contact our friendly team to ask for the default to be changed to suit your contractual obligations.
Note: Distance reporting does not affect the overall “Reliability KPI” in Mosaiq.
Distance reporting charts can be found in the Reliability tab of the Insights KPI dashboard, whether you are looking at the Operators or Services tab. You can also toggle to the “Table” view on these tabs to see your distance numbers in a different format.
To perform distance reporting in Mosaiq, you’ll need to provide shape_dist_traveled in either the shapes.txt or stop_times.txt files within your GTFS upload. This provides the distance between first and last recorded stops.
If you are unable to provide a shapes file, we will infer shapes. We do this by using heartbeats in a section to work out the path a bus takes between stops. With this data, we can calculate the shape and thus distance. Note: Inferred shapes data is not yet available and will be released in the coming weeks.
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