MIDLANDS BASED TRANSPORT TECH STARTUP NOMINATED FOR PRESTIGIOUS NATIONAL AWARD

Vectare, a Nottingham based transport technology and consultancy business, have been nominated for a prestigious national award as part of this year’s UK Bus Awards, having been chosen as a finalist from a shortlist of over 200.

Vectare was founded in 2016 by young entrepreneurs Peter Nathanail and Dominic Kalantary. The duo set out to challenge established ways of running buses, with a desire to encourage long term habitual bus use leading to an initial focus on home-to school transport. They believe that if you offer schoolchildren a pleasant and hassle-free bus journey to school, they are more likely to use the bus in their adult life as well, with technology central to achieving this vision.

Peter and Dominic have been managing school buses since their mid-teens, founding Vectare shortly after leaving secondary school. Over the last two years Vectare have worked with a wide range of clients, including Reading Buses, The Girls Day School Trust and Nottingham City Transport. They now work with 13 schools nationwide to plan and promote bus, coach and minibus services used by in excess of 2,000 pupils every schoolday. Their expanding team also offers a variety of technology and support services to enhance bus and coach operators' networks, with a focus on making better use of the data collected by various systems onboard passenger carrying vehicles.

The number of journeys made on local buses in the UK has fallen to a 12-year low, with operators who fail to predict demand trends based on their data almost certain to fail according to Dominic, who said "Demand for bus travel is both temporal and geographic. In order for operators to plan efficient and profitable routes, they need to know how many people are travelling in a certain direction at any one time, and exactly where they want to go. Much of this data is already collected by electronic ticket machines, but too many bus companies either don't understand the importance of this data or they lack the technology to analyse it meaningfully. If this doesn't change, the bus is at risk of becoming an irrelevant transport mode in all but the largest of urban areas".

Vectare’s nomination for a prestigious award at this year’s UK Bus Awards comes for their VecTive school transport management system. The New Horizons Award is intended to be a showcase for creativity and innovation, with seven finalists selected from over 200 contenders. Those nominated must demonstrate how they have stimulated interest in and desire for the bus product and improved the viability of the industry.

VecTive is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to the challenge of promoting and administering home to school transport services. The website offers a journey planning functionality to guide would-be passengers to their closest bus stop, eliminating a key barrier to bus use; lack of knowledge about when and where the bus actually stops. Once pupils have worked out how they can access their school by bus, they book online, with booking data transmitted to bus drivers in real time via a mobile app. The schools who now benefit from Vectare's attention have certainly enjoyed increased demand for their transport services, with one school seeing three times as many walk up passengers using their bus services since introducing Vectare's online booking system.

Peter said “We are delighted to have been nominated for such a prestigious award at such an early stage of our company's journey. The nomination is a fantastic way to round off a massive year of growth, and also a testament to both the quality of our product and the hard work of our development team.” The judges will now scrutinise each of the finalist's applications in even more detail, before the winner is announced at a glitzy awards ceremony at Troxy, London, on November 20^th.