Chapel Hill Transit, North Carolina: Fixed Route Routing and Scheduling
Download PDF"Trapeze FX with BlockBuster helped Chapel Hill Transit reduce weekly driver payroll by almost 200 hours. This reduction adds up to annual savings of about $200,000."
Nick Pittman, Scheduling Coordinator, Chapel Hill Transit
Background
Chapel Hill Transit (CHT) provides public transportation service throughout the Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and University of North Carolina community. It is a municipal department within the Town of Chapel Hill and was established in 1974. CHT, which operates fixed route and demand response service within a 25 square mile service area, became a fare-free system in January 2002. CHT offers over 142,000 annual hours of service. Carrying approximately 7.5 million riders a year, it is the second largest transit system in North Carolina.
Challenges
Before implementing Trapeze FX with BlockBuster, CHT employees had to manually create runcut scenarios. It would take them three to four weeks to put together a streetable runcut and prepare it for the drivers. When vehicle operators had specific requests or pointed out certain difficulties, schedulers had to go back to the drawing board and start all over again. This process of manually creating runcuts was not only tedious and time consuming, it was also inefficient and costly.
| Snapshot | |
|---|---|
| Type of Service: | Fixed Route and Paratransit Transport |
| Number of fixed route vehicles: | 99 |
| Trapeze products used: | FX with BlockBuster, MAPMAKER, PASS, PASS-MON among others |
Solution
In 2008, CHT installed FX with BlockBuster, Trapeze’s routing and scheduling system for fixed route transit. The system includes an advanced runcutting function. Now, CHT schedulers can create many different runcut scenarios in only two or three days, instead of three weeks. With its comprehensive and fully automated functionality, FX with BlockBuster also helped CHT eliminate human error that came with manually adjusting huge amounts of data. Today, worrying about missing runcuts as well as copy and paste errors are memories of the past.
BlockBuster combines powerful algorithms and comprehensive parameter settings to quickly generate various cost-effective operator assignment scenarios. The system is configured with CHT’s specific rules and requirements. Considering all these parameters, BlockBuster looks at hundreds of thousands of possibilities to put together a runcut—it would be impossible for schedulers to do this manually.
Results / Conclusion
FX with BlockBuster reduced the time CHT employees spend creating workable runcuts from up to four weeks to a mere few days. In addition to this significant reduction in administrative hours, CHT reduced weekly driver hours by almost 200, which adds up to annual savings of about $200,000.
BlockBuster was able to realize these efficiencies by combining two or three piece runs to eight-hour runs, shortening shift breaks and an overall tightening of all schedules. Bringing down expensive part time runs to a minimum was another major cost saving factor.
We at Trapeze are looking forward to helping Chapel Hill Transit save time and money for many more years to come!
