Martin Cooper MBCS talks to Malcolm Lowe, CIO for Transport for Manchester, about the unseen technology and innovation that combined to make his city a leader in smart city transportation.
The old joke that when you’re waiting for a bus, two — maybe three if it is raining — will eventually come along at once is something of a cliché. But according to Malcolm Lowe, Chief Information Officer for Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM), there’s more than a grain of truth in the story.
‘It’s like an old wives’ tale’, he says before diving into the maths, data and planning that make bus bunching a reality and how his team is working to smooth bus flows across Manchester. Proud of his city and its many traffic lights, he wouldn’t be drawn on whether it ever rains in Manchester.
What happens behind the scenes, he says, is that buses leave their depot on time and according to schedule. The problem is that they then enter a road network where conditions are not always optimal.
Roadworks and parked cars
‘Unplanned and uncontrollable things happen on roads and these cause buses to run more slowly than they should’, Malcolm explains. There could be road works, a traffic jam, or a delivery truck parked in a bus lane. These can all delay the buses and cause their progress along their pre-planned routes to stutter.
‘Today we’ve got a lot of tools that let us understand where buses are in real time… we get a lot of information about what’s going on across the network’, he says. ‘So, we can also get a clearer picture of these disruption events’ impacts.’
The data-gathering, listening and learning nature of Manchester’s network enables controllers to address the bunching problem. Suppose a human controller detects congestion in a bus lane. In that case, they can delay a departure from the depot by a few minutes, thereby smoothing and regulating the time intervals at which stops are visited.
Explaining his day job, Malcolm says: ‘Manchester is the largest transport authority in the UK after London. I’m accountable and responsible for all the digital technology services that allow the network in Greater Manchester to operate.’
And it’s quite a system. Called the Bee Network, Manchester’s public transport system is a feat of integration that is realised through communication, data and planning.
That past and the future
Explaining the Bee Network name, Malcolm says: ‘It’s all based on the idea of the worker bee, which is the symbol of Manchester.’ The symbol dates back to the Victorian era, when Manchester’s leaders had to decide on a coat of arms that would neatly tell the city’s story and place in the world. Worker bees are, of course, famously industrious, and Manchester was a famously industrial city. Today, the symbol endures and is everywhere, on park benches, building facades — and on the city’s buses.
Malcolm explains that pre-Bee Network travel across the city was something of a puzzle. Take the buses, for example. Previously, if you needed to traverse the city by bus, you’d need to buy different tickets for different buses — different bus operators ran different routes, and each had their unique tickets.
Today, plotting a journey across the city is just a matter of opening an app, which will recommend the best and most efficient route through the integrated bus, tram, and — most recently — bike hire system. Travellers can contactlessly tap-and-go on buses, bikes and trams as well as purchase tickets. Initially launched on Manchester’s trams in 2019, the tap-and-go system was rolled out across the city’s bus network in March 2025. Around the time this expansion occurred, the Bee Network reached a major milestone: the tram payment system had achieved 50 million contactless tap-and-go journeys. This equates to around 45,000 contactless payments a day.
‘Along with route planning, the system automatically calculates your fare’, Malcolm says. ‘You don’t have to work out “which tickets should I buy, what’s the best route, what’s the best price?” A digitally transformed public transport system does all that for you.’
The Bee Network is also an essential system. Public transport, Malcolm explains, is an incredibly positive force in people's lives. ‘In many ways, transport allows us to live our best lives’, he says. ‘It lets us move around, get to work, ensure that kids get to school on time and that people get to the hospital… it’s an enabler as well as being good for the environment. By 2030 all buses in Greater Manchester will be electric.’
Finishing his point, Malcolm says: ‘Ultimately, public transport is great for the economy.’
AI traffic management
Behind the Bee Network app’s simplicity and its seemingly immediate recommendations and flows of information, there is a tremendous amount of complexity, data and processing. Along with helping travellers navigate the city, this data is also used by the city itself to regulate flows.
‘At the moment, we have two traffic corridors — they’re a series of traffic signals on a particular route’, Malcolm enthuses. ‘We’re using CCTV cameras on these routes to identify traffic and congestion. We’re also using historic learning to look at congestion and change the sequencing of the traffic signals so that traffic then flows a lot more smoothly. It’s in trial on a few junctions and if it’s successful, we’ll roll it out across the whole network.’ This is enhancing an existing system that already reads when a bus is running late as it approaches a set of lights and can actively give extra green time to the bus to support punctuality. TfGM are also piloting a Highways Digital Twin to help predict and plan future traffic flows and disruptions.
Human in the loop
‘There are thousands of traffic junctions across Greater Manchester and a human can’t monitor all of them’, Malcolm explains. ‘Additionally, as humans, we tend to focus on areas where we know, from experience, congestion will occur. Or, we might spot the problem after it has happened due to the large number of things we need to monitor. By using data and AI, we can do so much more.
For you
Be part of something bigger, join BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
AI’s potential in this scenario is clear, Malcolm explains. The key to fixing traffic congestion at between junctions A and B might be a case of adjusting traffic signal timings within the wider network — but this cause-and-effect relationship is complex and may not be immediately apparent. Using AI to identify patterns in past and present traffic data, then recommend adjustments to a human opens up new possibilities. Keeping a human in the decision making loop is, however, critically important.
‘I was in our operational control centre’, Malcolm explains, ‘where people monitor our transport network and see all the CCTV. It was the end of the working day — peak time — and traffic was building up at a junction at the end of the Mancunian Way. They said: “We can clear this”. Using predefined strategies they held a set of traffic lights on green for five seconds longer, and the congestion disappeared. Just five seconds.’
At the moment, Malcolm explains, humans are the ones who watch and decide. The hope is that in the future, AI will be able to recommend a change, and a human will interrogate the recommendation and act on it if they agree. The next step might be for changes to be made automatically, but Malcolm was keen to emphasise that this is a very long-term ambition.
A different way to run the buses
A more immediate ambition focuses on temporary roadworks traffic lights. ‘At the moment, roadworks might be causing congestion’, Malcom explains. ‘What should happen is the private operator should change the signal timings for peak and off-peak. Sometimes they forget.’ This problem is compounded in many cities because different private operators run the buses, and the first time a bus operator might learn about new roadworks is when they encounter a line of waiting cars.
Manchester is different. In the 1980s, bus services in the UK were largely deregulated; private operators could set routes, fares and timetables with little oversight from local or national government. Critically, this severed the link between local authorities and bus companies, resulting in uncoordinated timetables, fragmented routes and single-operator tickets. Greater Manchester, however, controls bus franchising within its area of influence, allowing the city to foster closer communication between bus providers and the city. For passengers sick of waiting for bunched buses in the rain, this has some key advantages.
‘Now we’ve got control of the buses, we’ve got all the data — real-time data — and we understand where the buses are’, Malcolm explains. ‘We know what’s going on across the transport network. We also have numerous liaisons with local authorities, which private bus operators didn’t have, and we can ask them to change the timings on their [temporary] traffic lights if congestion is occurring.’
Currently, communication between Greater Manchester’s CCTV-observing traffic controllers and temporary traffic light operators is very manual. The hope is that in the future, temporary traffic lights could be integrated into the more extensive and adaptive permanent network that surrounds them.
A joined up approach
‘Greater Manchester is the second most visited city in the UK after London’, Malcolm says, ‘and it’s not hard to understand why.’ The city is home to Old Trafford, the Etihad Stadium, The Co-Op Live arena and the AO Arena. Sometimes, Malcolm says, they’ll have concerts and sporting events happening at all of these on the same day.
‘When significant events occur, our control centre will liaise with the Highways Authority, the police and local authorities. We call it a transport cell, so everybody is talking to everybody. Decisions are being made collectively, not individually, because one choice might have an unforeseen impact down the line.’
Importantly, this collaboration runs across all the cell members’ different CCTV networks. This means everybody can see what’s going on.
‘They’re our eyes and ears and allow us to adapt the network to what’s happening’, Malcolm says. ‘We might change some traffic signal sequencing or, if there’s a big football game on, we might get lots of fans walking to fan zones. This means we can coordinate with the police to close off routes. We may even divert buses in real-time. We’re also considering running special buses to the Manchester City stadium…if you buy your match ticket, you also get free travel on the public transport network.’
These big days, Malcolm says, are an example of when the Bee Network is working at its very best. The city, thanks to its behind-the-scenes sensors, data analysis and decision making, is all doing its job and adapting. And doing so invisibly.
