Public transport service suited to people's lives

We have finally put behind us a pandemic that has effectively been a 2.5-year continuous crisis management. However, crises always offer new opportunities. 2022 was all about seizing the opportunity to create a public transport service even better adapted to people’s lives.

Society in general, and public transport in particular, has changed forever. For example, many of us have gained a completely different flexibility in our everyday lives, through greater acceptance of the occasional home office. For some, it may make everyday life easier.

More people have invested in electric cars and not returned to public transport, which challenges the zero-growth target for private cars in the city center.

But if there’s one thing we also learned in the pandemic, it’s how we live very different lives within one and the same region. Many people cannot afford a car, while others do not have access to public transport because we have not adapted it well enough.

For us at Ruter, all this means we must think about our services in completely new ways.

We find that the owners largely support our ambitions, and the board continues to show us confidence. We were allocated NOK 170 million in 2023 for further strategic investment in development projects that will take us into the future.

That future mainly offers public transport services that respond to the needs of individuals.

Moreover, our services should be for everyone – regardless of functional ability, gender, age, ethnicity or economy. In practice, exclusion from public transport solutions is also an exclusion from the opportunity to participate in society.

Our ambition is for all citizens of our region to be able to move around freely without negatively impacting the climate and biodiversity.

The future is data-driven. That is why Ruter has already been leading developments in the mobility sector for several years, where ever greater data-based knowledge about customers is the basis for all development.

In the past, we analysed historical data and used it to predict the future. Now we are collecting more and more data about our customers in real time, which gives us continuous feedback on how we need to adapt our offer.

Ruter is actively exploring new technology for collecting and analysing data, developing individualised services and making public transport more sustainable – socially, economically and environmentally.

We will reach a major milestone in Oslo in 2023: By the end of the year, all public transport in the capital will be virtually emission-free.

The goal of emission-free public transport in Oslo and in Ruter’s area in Viken was formulated in 2018. We were aiming to achieve this goal in 2028, in close collaboration with the owners. We are proud to deliver five years ahead of schedule in the capital, and we are well on track in Viken as well.

We have achieved this goal by exploiting our scope of action inherent in the tenders. This has resulted in faster phasing-in of emission-free solutions. We have requested, explored and tested zero-emission technology together with our suppliers, while the market was still immature and the technology expensive and uncertain.

We formulated what we wanted to achieve in the tenders, without specifying the preferred technology. In this way, we contributed to increasing the demand for emission-free public transport in the market – which followed up with solutions. Electricity was the right technology. And it went faster than anyone could imagine.

This is the Ruter model at its very best.

We continue to work in the same way in several other areas. A more individualised public transport, which takes you from door to door, we believe is the Ruter of the future. The key to developing this type of service at scale lies in shared, self-driving vehicles.

Ruter started the first tests in 2019. We completed a pilot in Ski in 2022, and in 2023 we will start up a new pilot in Grorudalen – in cooperation with a number of operators and with financial support from Enova and the EU’s Horizon Europe Programme.

We believe this type of service has the potential to become a satisfactory alternative to private cars – and thus help to pull our entire transport system in a more sustainable direction.

At the end of the day, everything we work on in Ruter is geared towards one goal: We work towards sustainable mobility for everyone in our region. Part of that work involves winning the customer interface. We can only do this if we offer more and more services that are more individualised and cover all our customers’ mobility needs combined.

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is a solution where you can easily switch between different mobility services through a common mobile-based solution. That is the direction we at Ruter want to go. We took one big and important step in that direction in 2022: E-scooter rental was integrated into the Ruter app. Our customers can now both find and pay for E-scooters directly in the app.

If we are to win the customer interface, we must also develop new payment solutions that capture both current and future needs. We need more flexible products that support new travel patterns, no matter how these evolve in the future, and we need to integrate multiple ways of travelling into the same payment solution.

Many customers find that travel patterns can no longer be planned weeks ahead. The five-day week at the office has been changed to two or three days a week for more people. We completed a pilot project in 2022 called Reis, which provides an alternative to this particular group. With Reis, the customer earns personal discounts based on how frequently you travel over time.

Ruter used 2022 to prepare a brand new offers strategy. The strategy involves understanding how Ruter can offer customers attractive services that are built on our existing position, offers and infrastructure. The strategy provides principle clarifications and a framework for the development of Ruter’s services over the next three to five years.

The strategy states that everyone with mobility needs in the region is our customer. This means that we need to understand the travel behaviour, challenges and needs of all travellers, including those who travel most by car. The strategy also states that we will make everyday life easier for our customers. That could include providing services beyond mobility.

Since 2021, one of Ruter’s most important strategic goals has been to increase mobility for people with disabilities. We will not give up until we reach that goal and we inform our customers on our progress in that direction.

We have been increasing our knowledge and awareness on the topic for the past two years through a dedicated project called Sustainable Mobility for Everyone. Our mindset is to think of everyone becoming part of our DNA, a self-evident thought in everything we do and develop.

The project was completed in 2022, but the ambition, concept and working methods with remain with us going forward – such as close dialogue with user organizations and customers, and extensive participation from day one.

We have worked closely with the user organizations on this task. We have listened and learned. This has contributed to a huge cultural change at Ruter that affects the services we deliver. We have also built relationships that have helped us survive a major challenge in 2022.

Ruter took over the operation of adapted transport (TT) from the City of Oslo in January 2021. The transition went seamlessly at the start. Ruter took over the dispatch office on 1 July 2022, which was previously operated by DRT/Samres. Since 1 October, a new operator took over the driving of special vehicles.

Both operational changes resulted in major challenges for our most vulnerable customer group – from long order queues to incorrect runs. Learning how to run the adapted transport service takes time, because this service cannot tolerate safety deviations and insecurity.

By offering several forms of mobility in one package, we will be able to meet the new needs of our customers and give all citizens more choices and more flexibility. But in the midst of everything we are doing to make this happen, there’s one important thing to say:

We will continue to strengthen the existing public transport system.

Trams, buses, railways and boats as we know them today are and will remain the foundation of public transport for the future in Oslo and Viken.

– Bernt Reitan Jenssen, CEO