The School of Continuous Improvement's Impact Report 2021–2026 reports that a two-year, three-site trial of PEAK found no dwell-time reduction, and retires the programme without a promise of further work.
Two years, three kerbside sites, and no measurable cut to how long a car idles at the school gate, the bus interchange or the car-park exit
Two years and three kerbside sites were enough to answer the question PEAK was built to ask, and the answer was no. The School of Continuous Improvement’s Impact Report 2021–2026, released today, reports that Predictive Egress At Kerbside — a predictive dispatch nudge trialled at a school pick-up zone, a bus interchange and a car-park exit — produced no measurable cut to vehicle dwell time against the forty-second reduction target it was commissioned to meet.
Led by Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Demo Quarter, with Dr Joost Nwosu and Dr Marit Osayande, the report follows PEAK from its pilot commissioning through the full two-year trial, comparing dwell time at each site against the target before and after the system’s dispatch nudges went live. No attributable difference turned up at any of the three sites.
The School frames the finding as exactly what a properly instrumented programme is supposed to produce: a clear answer, reported without a softening clause, and a closed entry rather than an open one.
A dispatch system that changes nothing is still telling you something, and the something is that we can stop asking it to.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Nwosu, who oversaw PEAK’s admission to the Indicator Commons as a closed entry, said the file now exists “to stop the same trial being proposed again under a different acronym.”
The full report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.uz8i1t.