On 9 December the Regional Minister of Public Works and the Environment, Antonio Silván, received a delegation from Austria’s Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology, which is setting up a working group to carry out joint transnational cooperation projects working towards universal public-transport accessibility.

The delegation’s aim is to find transport systems that guarantee equal conditions for the disadvantaged groups that stand most in need of public support in their daily activities, particularly seeking solutions for the elderly, the disabled and care-dependent persons.

In their mission to find out about Spanish policies and projects designed to help disabled people the members of the delegation highlighted the public usefulness and success of Castilla y León’s transport-on-demand model, a trailblazer in Spain, promoted by the Regional Ministry of Public Works of Castilla y León and designed and developed with GMV’s help.

GMV’s on-demand transport system enables towns and villages to be connected à la carte. It consists of a real-time technological platform, including onboard equipment with GPS receivers and GPRS modems on the vehicles and interactive information panels in the various localities telling users how long the vehicle will take to arrive and informing them of any incidents, delays, etc. It is rounded out by a web booking facility.

The service works as follows: after receipt of the phoned-in transport requests, in planned mode or real time, the service is automatically planned to suit, and the transport operators are informed of the requests. The transport arrangement is then monitored online and users are kept abreast of any service incidents on the information panels.

A vital part of the project is the direct communication between the end user of the transport-on-demand system and the management authority through a booking center housed in GMV’s Boecillo site (Valladolid). All service users have to do is phone in their request and the buses then plan their routes to pick up each one, bypassing other places with no recorded requests.

The Austrian expedition visited the booking center to find out at firsthand how the system works in practice: after users have phoned in a request this is passed on in real time by the cotrol center to the operator for it lay on the corresponding transport. Last-minute requests are sent directly to the bus driver’s onboard console, which the delegation also saw in operation.

Since being brought into operation Castilla y León’s transport-on-demand system has now been extended to take in 810 routes covering a total of 3557 localities within the region, catering for over one million people living in rural areas. As well as in Spain GMV has also set up similar systems in Portugal.