Many agencies think of their technology solutions as distinct but interactive: for example, Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) and Intelligent Transportation Management Systems (ITS) work just fine on their own but they’re also integrated to share data and complement one another’s performance.
When you build a lot of solutions the way we do, they need to work together to deliver full value and that means seamlessly sharing data.
Integrating AFC and ITS data together means while AFC collects raw data, it gets stored in the ITS data mart. From there, NGVP connects to the data mart to visualize the information.
Lost in the technical explanation though is the essence of what your agency can use this integrated data for right now to improve passenger experience and operational efficiency.
Right now you can use standalone AFC data to determine total boardings, fares by type and other ridership stats. By combining this data with ITS, now you’ve got not only when people board the bus but also when getting off the bus. Just because no one boards doesn’t mean it’s an idle stop – tremendous amount of people can be debarking at that stop too.
Combined with ITS, you get the opportunity for real time alarms. In real time, your system can send an alert to the back office so when send vehicle out to be fixed, you know already exactly what to look for, they’ll have the right equipment to put the bus back in service – resulting in less fare loss/preventable maintenance.
Agencies produce a lot of data in tables that’s boring to analyze, so, sometimes people don’t pay attention to it until something bad happens. The trick to unleashing data’s power in the agency is to present it in a form that’s convenient and helps users spot failures before they happen. This is where graphical visualization is so important.
To visualize all this disparate data we offer convenient personal dashboards for each service level, so the GM can have a different view than someone in operations, or finance, for example. Experience teaches us that when staff are more engaged with data visually, they develop more new means of finding problems and making real-time decisions.
Many clients use AFC data to spot trends with the farebox: Is there an increase in coin rejects or coin acceptors not operating? If so, that could be an indicator the system is not working and we can get it fixed before it fails.
One of the most expensive things you can do with a bus is have it stopped with no one getting on or off. By combining AFC and ITS data, you can look at boarding and disembarking at a particular stop, at particular time to determine if it’s worthwhile. This information is of great value to another part of the enterprise, Planning and Scheduling, as a tool to make decisions about changing routes and to justify decision making to management, the board and the general public.
Now that you can visualize and analyze integrated data, your agency can use it to go from ‘Here’s what happened’ to ‘Here’s what we should do next.’
Take a common event, like determining if you need an extra bus at a particular stop during rush hour. As you ponder that extra bus, you can scan information that tells you what demand is at rush hour, how full other buses are, and if any of them are a risk for farebox or vehicle failures.
Put together, that’s a powerful intellectual basis for making your ‘extra bus’ decision and more well-made decisions mean happier passengers, fewer failures and more efficient fare collection.
It is a sign of times that customers are demanding common access to all their data and the ability to analyze it for its business intelligence value. For the transit industry, it’s important that data from AFC, ITS and everywhere else is integrated and accessible.
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