Oulu Public Transport Authority (Oulu) in Finland, has spent the past several years building a data-driven planning culture with Swiftly. The Oulu team has implemented Swiftly data into their planning process for years, having previously analyzed route run-times to eliminate the need for two buses without sacrificing punctuality. Today, Oulu continues to use Swiftly's On-Time Performance and Run-Times products to adjust timetables and analyze arrival and departure data trends.
As a result, Swiftly’s Transit Data Platform has helped Oulu push on-time performance and reliability higher, support more productive data-driven discussions with contractors, and justify operational decisions with data instead of anecdote.
“From a decision-making perspective, Swiftly has significantly improved our ability to understand when additional vehicles are truly needed to operate the service and when reliability issues are instead caused by operational practices,” said Helena Väliaho, Public Transport Manager at Oulu. “By providing objective, data-driven insights, Swiftly helps us distinguish between capacity constraints and operator-related performance issues. Over the long term, this leads to substantial cost savings for the public transport authority by avoiding unnecessary additions to fleet and service levels.”
Oulu at a glance
- Location: Oulu region, Finland (Oulu, Hailuoto, Ii, Kempele, Liminka, Lumijoki, Muhos, and Tyrnävä)
- Network: 97 bus routes across 1,980 stops
- Operators: 4 contracted operators (Koiviston Auto Oulu, Nobina, Oubus, and Wiimax)
- Swiftly partner since: 2020
- Swiftly products: On-Time Performance and Run-Times
Results at a glance
- On-time performance has improved year-round to over 85% — surpassing Oulu's own long-standing internal OTP target for the first time — including a 7% year-over-year jump in the summer of 2025 up to 88.6%.
- Early departures — the leading cause of missed connections — have been nearly cut in half, falling to under 3% in both winter (2.6%) and summer (2.3%), down from roughly 4–5% two years earlier.
- Swiftly's reporting on arrival and departure data at terminal and intermediate stops has become a powerful tool for supporting contract compliance and finding operational efficiencies with Oulu's contracted operators, helping the team identify and address reliability challenges and reduce late departures from first stops on some of their busiest routes.
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Building on a data-driven foundation
Oulu's partnership with Swiftly began with a simple problem: The planning team was adjusting run-times and building timetables based on anecdotal feedback from drivers and passengers, which was slow and imprecise. Swiftly's On-Time Performance and Run-Times products let planners analyze performance stop by stop instead of route by route — a shift documented in a previous case study, which found that on-time performance improved 10–20% on adjusted routes and shorter run-times freed up the equivalent of two buses.
Since then, Oulu has kept adjusting timetables every season without increasing the time spent on planning, and has continued to push on-time performance higher across the network.
“Swiftly's reporting helps us move from assumptions to evidence. We can better identify operational challenges, monitor the suitability of running times, and support constructive discussions with operators.”
Lotta Kaarlela, Public Transport Planner, Oulu Regional Transport (OSL)
Turning historical data into actionable insights to improve service reliability
This year, Oulu has used Swiftly’s tools to dig deeper into arrival and departure analysis at terminal and intermediate stops. The planning team now has a more granular view of two related but distinct problems:
- Avoidable late departures are trips that depart late from an intermediate or terminal stop despite having arrived early or on time, which point to a scheduling or operational issue rather than genuine traffic delay. Because avoidable late departures are within a contractor's control, this analysis gives Oulu's planning team a clear, data-backed basis for performance monitoring and constructive conversations with contractors.
- Excessive dwell time exists when buses linger at intermediate stops longer than scheduled even when they still depart on time, which can signal a run-time that isn't fully optimized (with drivers effectively self-correcting by “regulating” at a stop). This same data lets planners fine-tune schedules further, trimming extra buffer time where it isn't needed and reinvesting those resources elsewhere in the network.
This analysis gives Oulu's team valuable supporting data for performance monitoring and conversations with operators — helping distinguish traffic-related delays from issues within an operator's control. That visibility has already supported more constructive discussions and raised awareness of performance issues.
An example of this impact can be seen on routes 1, 2, 3, and 5, which faced the greatest operator-related reliability challenges last winter. The total number of avoidable late departures on these lines decreased by 54%, from 1,036 in February 2026 to 477 in May 2026. The improvement is even more pronounced when looking specifically at cases involving vehicle changes. On route 3, 81.9% of avoidable late departures in February were related to vehicle changes, compared to just 20.4% in May.
Swiftly's Reporting & Insights tools have been valuable in monitoring the accuracy and relevance of scheduled running times as part of contract performance management. The tools help identify locations and time periods where schedules no longer reflect actual operating conditions and provide valuable evidence for discussions with operators. This has supported collaborative problem-solving, helped address operational bottlenecks, and improved the quality of schedule planning and contract monitoring.
“Real-world operational data has given us greater confidence in schedule and vehicle planning decisions, helping us use resources more efficiently without compromising service quality.”
Lotta Kaarlela, Public Transport Planner, Oulu Regional Transport (OSL)
Progressive, year-over-year OTP gains
Weekday, Saturday, and Sunday on-time performance has improved every season since winter 2023–24, culminating in two milestone seasons — summer 2025 and winter 2025–26 — in which Oulu surpassed its long-standing internal on-time performance target of 85% for the first time. Early departures, which cause riders to miss connections, have also dropped sharply:
- Winter 2023–24 (weekdays): 83.9% on time · 4.9% early · 11.2% late
- Winter 2024–25 (weekdays): 84.2% on time · 4.1% early · 11.8% late
- Winter 2025–26 (weekdays): 85.3% on time · 2.6% early · 12.1% late
- Summer 2024 (weekdays): 83.1% on time · 3.9% early · 13.0% late
- Summer 2025 (weekdays): 88.6% on time · 2.3% early · 9.1% late
Source: Oulu OTP analysis, 2023–2025 (weekday service, all routes).
What's next
Oulu will continue to adjust timetables with Swiftly and dig further into historical trends, with the goal of identifying additional run-time optimizations and collaborating with data-driven contractor performance management.
