Swedish Skånetrafiken launches a live map which shows free seats on buses in real time

The Swedish transport principal Skånetrafiken launches the first version of a live map which shows how many people are travelling on the buses in real time.

Many need to travel with Skånetrafiken despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. To plan your journey, it can be good to know if there is room on the bus that you plan to travel on.

Thanks to a new service developed by Skånetrafiken in response to the situation, our customers can now see exactly this. Work on the service began after Skånetrafiken participated in the Hack the Crisis event in early April - arranged by the Swedish Government.

"We want to assume our part of the responsibility and ensure that things do not get cramped on board. By quickly launching this service, we hope to help residents in need of functioning public transport for important societal functions such as healthcare and education," says Linus Eriksson, traffic director at Skånetrafiken.

We already had a live map showing the location of our buses and trains. On the updated map, passengers can now on a trial basis see how many free seats there are.

You can find the map here: https://skanetrafiken.livemap24.com/#/
(works best in newer browsers such as Chrome).

The service is still under development and will have some issues to be ironed out. For example, at the moment, not all our buses and trains have systems for automatically counting passengers. In the first version, we start by showing how many people are travelling on our buses. The Pågatågen trains will soon be added as well.

Help us improve our service
We would love help from our customers in improving the service. If they have a comment or suggestion for how to improve the service, they can fill in the form on the same page as the live map.

Skånetrafiken is currently doing daily manual counts of passengers and free seats on the most popular routes in order to avoid congestion. With this new service, our customers will also get a clear view of how many passengers we have.

How the service works
On buses where we automatically count passengers getting off and on, there is a row with four fields which can be green, yellow, or red.

If less than 25 per cent of seats are taken, one field is green. With 26-50 per cent of seats taken, two green fields are shown. With 51-75 per cent of seats taken, two green and one yellow field are shown. Finally, a red field is shown if 76 per cent or more of the seats are taken.

The service is based on many buses and trains having systems which constantly count the number of passengers getting off and on.

If a bus or train lacks automatic passenger counting, we show no indication about the number of passengers.

In addition to these areas, there is automatic passenger counting in several cities, such as Malmö, but not on all buses. It is easiest to look at the map to see what the situation is like where you travel.

For more information, please contact pressoffice Skånetrafiken +46 451 28 85 03.

 
Skånetrafiken works to serve everyone living, working, and travelling in Skåne. We make it easy to travel sustainably. Each day, people make around 465,000 journeys with some of our 14,000 daily services by bus and train and 5,000 mobility service journeys – to work, family, and friends. Our bus and train journeys are certified as Bra Miljöval (Good Environmental Choice) and by travelling by public transport, we create a sustainable society, a better environment, and a living landscape. It empowers all of Skåne. Or gives it a ride, if you will.

Skånetrafiken is part of Region Skåne, tasked with offering sustainable public transport in Skåne. Our annual turnover is around SEK 6.2 billion and each year our city buses, region buses, Pågatåg, Öresundståg, and Krösatåg trains, along with the mobility service vehicles help provide a total of more than 170 million journeys. All transports are operated by various contractors.