New ‘Echo Shared Rides’ technology enters the market aiming to ease industry shortages

Magenta Technology has launched its unique ‘Echo Shared Rides’ technology which aims to enable fleets to move more passengers through maximised utilisation of their existing capacity and via shared rides to ease concerns with the lack of drivers and vehicles facing transport operators.

The provider of software for dispatch automation and fleet optimisation for ground passenger transportation extended the technology stack of their AI-based automated scheduling and dispatch system Echo with the new Shared Rides Technology.

The new functionality intelligently takes multiple individually booked journeys and puts them together in single vehicle multi-stop ‘Trips’, based on settings calibrations that can be adapted for and applied to different sets of potential passengers.

This technology ensures that fleets can use as many of the seats in their vehicles as possible. Less empty seats means that the vehicles themselves are working harder offering a greater ROI. It also means operators do not have to increase their fleet size to handle increased demand, while enabling the customer to save on the cost of their journeys.

The technology is being seen as a tool to battle against driver and vehicle shortages being felt by the industry the world over. This, on top of the intelligent scheduling algorithm that already exists in Echo, means doing more with less can become an achievable goal.

Early adopters of Shared Rides have seen the following:

• 5,500km of driven mileage and over 50 hours of driving time saved per day for a fleet in Dubai

• Over 145,000 excess kilometres saved in the first 6 months for an employee transportation specialist in South America

• Over 980 dead miles saved in a contained ‘hub’ style shuttle service between Heathrow Airport Terminals and Hotels during H1 2022.
  

Further rollouts are planned in both the UK and elsewhere as supply and demand trends shift.