Who it’s for
Four buyers, one honesty posture
Urban Pathways is built for four groups. Each gets a different decision to make, and the same honesty posture stands behind all of them: Urban Pathways screens and prioritises corridors, it does not forecast demand, and every result carries a confidence tier.
City and metropolitan transit authorities
Screen the whole network before you commission a single business case.
The decision is which corridors go into this capital-works cycle, on what vehicle, and whether that vehicle stays diesel or goes electric. Urban Pathways ranks every candidate corridor in the network on one comparable basis, with the mode and fleet size that follow for each, and a whole-of-life cost per boarding over a twenty-year horizon — the language a Treasury submission is written in. For the fleet question specifically, three costed scenarios show what staying diesel, electrifying in place, or electrifying with the fleet resized would each return, corridor by corridor. It narrows a large candidate set to a shortlist worth a business case; it is not the business case itself.
Common question: does this replace our four-step model or predict patronage? No — Urban Pathways does not forecast patronage; it is a screening and prioritisation step upstream of detailed modelling. Every result carries an explicit confidence tier, and the output is designed to feed a business case, not stand in for one.
Public-transport operators and MaaS providers
Find the gaps in your network before your customers do.
The decision is which gap in your own network is worth closing first, and what it costs to run once closed. Urban Pathways screens against your current route network, so every ranked corridor is flagged as already served or still open before you spend on it. For each unserved corridor it returns the mode, an indicative fleet size and a whole-of-life cost per boarding, so the gap can be weighed against your own fleet and depot costings before a full network redesign gets commissioned.
Common question: we already run route-optimisation and scheduling tools. Urban Pathways doesn’t optimise or schedule existing routes — it discovers candidate corridors nobody has drawn yet, upstream of those tools, and hands the shortlist on with a confidence tier attached.
Development banks, DFIs and C40-aligned programmes
Prioritise where the data is thin, before you spend on the appraisal.
The decision is which cities and corridors in a pipeline get appraisal budget, not just which corridor within one city. Urban Pathways works from open road and transit data (OpenStreetMap and GTFS) rather than a mature travel model, which matters in exactly the Global-South markets where transit and climate finance is increasingly directed — the World Bank alone carries an active transport portfolio of close to US$45 billion and approved 53 new transport operations worth US$11.2 billion in FY25 (World Bank), and C40’s 97 member cities, representing 920 million people, carry standing climate-action commitments that increasingly translate into transit-mode-shift targets (C40 Cities). Ranking candidate corridors across many cities on one method turns that decision from a qualitative judgement into a comparison, with confidence tiers making data limitations visible rather than hidden.
Common question: can we trust a ranking built on incomplete or informal data? That is precisely why every result carries a confidence tier — lower-data corridors are flagged as lower confidence, not concealed. The tool’s job is to direct scarce appraisal budget to the most promising candidates, not to replace the appraisal itself.
Engineering and planning consultancies
The fast, defensible front end to your detailed design work.
The decision is which corridors on a client’s shortlist are worth a detailed-design proposal. Urban Pathways is a partner and front end, not a competitor: it screens and ranks corridors quickly, then hands the confidence-tiered shortlist to your consultancy for detailed design, modelling and business-case work. It performs no network design, routing or scheduling of its own — that work, and the fee for it, stays with you.
Common question: does this compete with our network-planning or travel-demand-modelling services? No — Urban Pathways only screens and ranks. It is not a network-planning, routing or scheduling tool, and every shortlist it produces is handed off with a confidence tier for your own modelling to take further.