First Bus and Abellio have installed the Journeo EDGE intelligent gateway on their fleets, enabling them to connect to the Journeo Transit cloud platform.

The EDGE is a small, intelligent automotive gateway, and once Journeo’s technicians have installed it, the Transit platform offers operators remote access to systems previously only a visit to the bus could achieve.  This has been of particular benefit to socially distanced operations in the last twelve months.

First Bus is midway through a major rollout of the EDGE connected to the Transit video and health modules. This is in addition to the 2000 vehicles already sending CCTV health data and helping First Bus to continue to improve its level of successful video downloads.

Michelle Grosvenor, Head of Insurance, commented, “Using Journeo Transit, our evidence collection process has become much more efficient, increasing the efficiency and speed with which we can assess and respond to claims, or provide data to third parties, such as the police. 

“We have been using the remote health monitoring for some time now and seen it increase download availability substantially, so we are now in a position that we have more evidence available and are able to access it faster.”

After the successful implementation of the Journeo Transit solution on to Abellio’s New Routemaster buses last year, the London operator was so impressed that it has worked to extend it further across other vehicles in the fleet.

Journeo Transit now allows Abellio to track the location of its large ancillary fleet of Ferry Cars and engineering vans, check the health of on-board CCTV systems and request video following the replacement of previous dashcam and tracking solutions.

Both rollouts are important steps to help reduce unnecessary visits to vehicles while providing critical video to Abellio and police staff far sooner than they could before.

The Ferry Vehicle solution is offered using HIKVision’s small vehicle recorders and its connection to the EDGE provides the secure communications that Abellio needs to view them alongside its bus fleet.  The system’s two HD cameras provide a clear view of the road ahead and within the vehicle and by tracking the vehicle, Abellio now has the capability to see, real time, the location of vehicles.

Adam Shellard-Dedman, Operational Safety Manager of Abellio commented, “Staff and customer safety has never been more important than it has in the last year, so by using the Journeo Transit portal to work remotely, we have been able to maintain social distancing rules whilst keeping our systems operational.  

“This assisted our CCTV analysts to work safely throughout the pandemic; accessing, previewing across our estate of DVRs from multiple manufacturers and distributing vital CCTV evidence without having to visit the vehicle.

“When the opportunity arose to extend the roll out so that more of our vehicles could benefit from the system, we were excited at the prospect of managing all our security systems, no matter the original manufacturer, from a single and secure online platform.”

Following the launch of the Journeo Transit platform a little over 12 months ago, the secure cloud-based portal now has in excess of 2000 vehicle connections, delivering operators information on system health, remote CCTV downloads and automatic passenger counting statistics, all in real time.

The powerful and secure Journeo Edge intelligent gateway handles communication between on-board systems, maintaining continuous health checks with components of all connected systems, such as CCTV DVRs and cameras, fire suppressant equipment and even vehicle diagnostic information via the CANBus.

With this wide range of compatible systems supported, the EDGE can prioritise its data transfer to minimise SIM costs yet deliver the important information instantly if required. Furthermore, all information is sent over an encrypted VPN link.

A major benefit enjoyed by Journeo Transit users is the agnostic design of its video download function.  Configured to work with all major CCTV systems in use throughout the UK in the last 10 years, the cloud-based portal enables users to request their evidence downloads from anywhere with an internet connection. Footage is transferred to the secure EvidenceSafe via the encrypted 4G connection, dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes CCTV analysts to gather and assess the captured footage.

Because the evidence is stored in the cloud, operators no longer require expensive infrastructure such as depot servers or even Wi-Fi networks, nor have to worry about the GDPR concerns of transferring evidence via DVD or USB.  Instead, the portal’s advanced identity management allows users to share footage securely with approved internal and external third parties.  All transactions with the evidence are logged to keep a complete audit log of interactions with the evidence.

Connected systems, for connected journeys.