How it works
Screening, not forecasting
Urban Pathways answers a narrower question than a demand forecast, deliberately. It does not predict patronage and does not produce a business case. What it does is screen an entire road network and rank where a new or upgraded surface-transit corridor is most likely to be worth a detailed look — a screening and prioritisation step that sits upstream of network design, scheduling and detailed modelling, and feeds them a shortlist rather than replacing them.
The five factors
Every candidate corridor is scored against five factors, each carrying a fixed headline weight [Source: WRLAM five-factor framework — headline disclosure]:
| Factor | Weight | What it captures |
|---|---|---|
| Demand Potential | 30% | Where travel demand is concentrated but underserved |
| Transport Gap | 20% | Congestion and car-dependence relative to available transit |
| Travel-Time Competitiveness | 20% | How well transit could compete with driving on that corridor |
| Infrastructure Feasibility | 20% | Running-way and lane availability, depot and charging siting, grade and junction geometry |
| Regulatory Ease | 10% | How straightforward the corridor is to approve and deliver |
These five factors and their headline weights are all we publish. The detailed scoring logic beneath them — how each factor is built up and combined — is retained as trade secret; that is a deliberate boundary, not an oversight, and it holds across every page of this site.
Mode-aware by design
Urban Pathways does not just rank corridors — it selects among bus classes for each one: diesel bus, electric bus, articulated BRT, trackless tram or minibus/paratransit, favouring dedicated-right-of-way modes on congested, high-demand corridors and lighter modes where demand is thinner.
Confidence tiers
Every screening result carries an explicit confidence tier stating how much verification stands behind it — from an indicative first pass through to results checked against domain-panel review. The Sydney pilot, for example, sits at Level 2: indicative screening, with domain-panel verification still pending [Source: Sydney pilot facts]. We surface the tier next to every result, not in a footnote, because a transit authority should be able to see at a glance how much weight a number can bear.
What it hands off — and what it doesn’t do
Urban Pathways discovers and ranks corridors. It does not design routes, build timetables, roster crews, or run traffic simulation — that work belongs to network-design, scheduling and detailed-modelling tools, and to the engineering consultancies and internal teams that run them. Urban Pathways’ job finishes where theirs begins: handing over a short, confidence-tiered list of corridors worth their time.