Bus priority in practice: apprentices put GIS to work for Newham
What was the bootcamp?
The 25 apprentices on the Transport Modelling, Digital Skills and Emerging Technologies course came from across the country, from public transport organisations, local authorities and the private sector. The course was designed and delivered by the programme’s co-directors, Dr Fulvio Lopane and Dr Ka Ho Tsoi. It equips apprentices with digital tools fundamental to the profession, and the bootcamp took an experiential approach putting those tools to work on a real-life local transport challenge.
Working with the London Borough of Newham (LBN), the course team designed an industry-led assessment based on a real bus priority project commissioned by the borough. In groups, apprentices acted as consultants delivering a Newham bus priority study. Their task was to identify and prioritise measures that would make bus journeys quicker and more reliable, and encourage more people to travel by bus. LBN set five objectives:
- understanding where buses are delayed and why;
- assessing how well existing bus priority measures perform;
- recommending a prioritised pipeline of short-, medium- and long-term schemes;
- building evidence for business cases and funding bids;
- improving accessibility, safety and the passenger experience.
Over the in-person bootcamp week, apprentices learnt geographic information systems (GIS), software planners use to map and analyse location-based data, by applying it directly to the Newham case.
What was involved?
Apprentices received the brief well before the bootcamp and were encouraged to identify and collect their own data in advance, which freed the week for analysis and building recommendations. Beforehand, representatives from LBN delivered a seminar introducing the real project behind the brief, so apprentices heard the challenge first-hand from the client.
During the bootcamp, apprentices worked through ten hands-on tutorials in QGIS (a free, open-source GIS platform), with each tutorial building on the last. They began by mapping London’s bus routes and preparing clean data for Newham, then moved on to richer analysis:
- mapping where bus services concentrate;
- finding bus stops with clusters of nearby collisions;
- combining demand, congestion, safety and accessibility into a single map of priority corridors;
- modelling walking catchments to reveal where reaching a bus stop on foot is hardest.
Every tutorial ended with tasks that turned each exercise into material for the groups’ own studies.
The week also brought the wider sector into the room. A speaker from Transport for London (TfL) explained how GIS is used in the London Plan, the Mayor’s strategy for the capital’s growth. And England’s Economic Heartland, a sub-national transport body that plans across a large region beyond London, gave a talk on transport modelling.
At the end of the week, each group gave a ten-minute presentation of its study to a panel of instructors, followed by questions. As in a real client pitch, groups had to get straight to their methods, evidence and recommendations. The standard was high across every group.
How did apprentices learn?
Apprentices followed a four-stage workflow like those used in consultancy:
Finally, they shaped the results into a programme of quick wins, medium-term schemes and long-term schemes.
The bootcamp used largely real open data, including:
- TfL bus routes and stops;
- Department for Transport collision records;
- OS Open Roads;
- Public Transport Accessibility Levels (PTAL), TfL’s measure of how well connected each location is to public transport.
They began with a baseline review of bus performance, stop accessibility, road safety and local policy.
They then drew up a long list of practical interventions, such as bus lanes, bus gates, kerbside changes and bus stop improvements, and checked that each would fit on the street.
Next, they built a weighted prioritisation framework, submitted as a spreadsheet, that scored every option against LBN’s objectives.
Key benefits for students included:
- Working on a real local authority project: apprentices tackled a brief based on a bus priority project commissioned by LBN. Their recommendations had to be practical, affordable and deliverable.
- Digital skills for the job: the bootcamp built confidence in mapping and spatial analysis, from first maps to multi-criteria analysis and walking catchments. Apprentices can take the free software straight back to work, or apply the learning within other licensed GIS platforms.
- Hearing directly from the sector: the LBN seminar and the talks from TfL and England’s Economic Heartland showed how a borough, a city-wide authority and a regional body each approach transport problems.
- Judgement about data: sourcing, justifying and openly critiquing their own data taught apprentices to recognise what evidence can and cannot support.
- From analysis to investment decisions: building a weighted prioritisation framework and a phased programme showed how technical work becomes the evidence behind business cases and funding bids.
- Professional communication and teamwork: working with peers from different organisations and regions, and presenting a complex study in ten minutes, developed skills mapped to the Transport Planner apprenticeship standard. The presentation also prepared apprentices for their end-point assessment, the final assessment of the apprenticeship.
Learner perspective
One of the most valuable aspects of the bootcamp was working on a real project brief and hearing directly from the London Borough of Newham team about their sustainable travel aspirations and challenges. The opportunity to learn and use QGIS for the first time, alongside collaborating with apprentices from other organisations, helped me develop practical skills and gain new analytical perspectives that I can apply to my own projects.
The Transport Planning Bootcamp was a great opportunity to see how different elements of a real-life project come together. Having worked on similar projects as a transport planner, I particularly enjoyed using QGIS to create heatmaps based on real-world data, including collisions, PTAL accessibility and bus route density.
It was great to develop practical skills that I can take away and apply directly in my day-to-day role. It was refreshing to work with apprentices from different areas of transport planning, which brought a range of perspectives to the study of the London Borough of Newham and made the project feel much more representative of how real-life schemes are delivered.
Faculty perspective
Our apprentices spend most of their working week inside transport organisations, so we wanted the bootcamp to feel like their day jobs, only with more time to think. Basing the brief on a real project commissioned by the London Borough of Newham meant every map had a purpose: each piece of analysis had to earn its place in a recommendation a client could act on.
What impressed me was the quality of every presentation. It was good to see groups questioning its own data, being open about its limits, and still arrive at clear, prioritised recommendations. That kind of honest, evidence-led judgement is exactly what the profession needs.
This bootcamp shows why experiential learning is so valuable in education. We designed it around the Newham brief, so each tutorial built towards the groups’ own studies. By acting as transport planners, our apprentices investigated into a specific problem in Newham, applied the skills they had learnt and made their own judgements on which data to use. This is an essential step as our apprentices move into senior roles, where they will be responsible for these decisions.
The bootcamp also allowed us to work on the data together, and apprentices from different organisations brought their own perspectives to it. In the final presentations, I was pleased to see that the groups had gone from their first maps to a full programme of schemes in just one week. The presentations were also very diverse, as many apprentices drew on their own work experience to add ideas to their group’s study.”