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Case Study: Van Tran of Tucson, Inc.Using New Technology to Automate Comparisons of Paratransit and Fixed Route Service Company: Van Tran of Tucson Inc. BackgroundVan Tran of Tucson Inc. has been providing quality paratransit services for the City of Tucson, AZ since 1987. Funded by local tax dollars, Van Tran service is only available to persons with disabilities who have a current ADA Eligibility Card. ChallengeVan Tran wanted to perform analysis of its paratransit service that involved assessing the comparability of ADA paratransit service with the fixed route service operated by Sun Tran, metropolitan Tucson’s public transportation provider. More specifically, Van Tran wanted to identify paratransit trips that lay outside the service area and/or the hours of fixed route service. It was important to assess this information on a route by route basis. “We needed to address the perception that travel times on Van Tran were excessive and to adopt a resulting standard that would be meaningful. We wanted a mechanism to collect data for FTA auditing purposes and to quantify how much non-ADA service we were providing and the reason why the trips would be considered non-ADA” says Gary Clark, Information Technology Manager at Van Tran. Analyzing the length or duration of its ADA paratransit trips in comparison with the duration of a corresponding fixed route trip would have been very time consuming as a manual process. SolutionVan Tran turned to Trapeze Group and its PASS-IPA solution, which provided the demand response scheduling and dispatch system that the agency used to manage its paratransit service. “We wanted to improve our service in a fair and equitable manner for all riders which in turn allowed us to increase ridership and reduce resources” says Clark “The data to be utilized in both an historical manner and in real time came from existing Trapeze products. It was the classical no-brainer to turn to the developers of the two separate systems to provide the link between the two.” Trapeze provided Van Tran with a new module that would automatically compare paratransit trips with fixed route schedule data and trip itineraries. This module was seamlessly integrated with the existing enterprise Trapeze system. The enterprise was then linked to the INFO-Agent itinerary planning system used by SunTran to provide trip plans. ResultsThe analysis of non-ADA paratransit service data for July 2006 through June 2007 focused on a number of metrics, including trips outside service hours, origin outside of area, destination outside of area, and both origin and destination outside of area. Van Tran learned that 34,999 trips would not have occurred on the fixed route system. This is very significant in that it represents 8.32% of Van Tran service for the year. The analysis of trip times for the ADA service showed that between 93 – 94% of trips were shorter than their fixed route alternatives. 97 – 98% of trips were within 10 minutes of the fixed route travel time. The fixed route time calculations, adjusted to include walking time to and from stops and wait time at the stop, became the proposed number in a consent decree with a litigant based on adjusted fixed route time + 10%. According to Clark, the communication with the developers of the software and Trapeze’s willingness to go the extra mile, were the key factors that contributed to the success of the project. Bottom LineVanTran was able to use the analysis to defend its level of service to critics, avoiding potentially significant costs of a legal settlement. Subsequently, VanTran has implemented real-time evaluation, allowing trips to be constrained according to agreed service standards while callers are still on the phone. The non-ADA trips can be costed as a separate service and decision makers can then choose whether or not to provide the service and at what cost. Non-ADA trips can be exported to an external GIS system and can be used to adjust the path of fixed route service planning. Rather than using a sample of ADA trips to use for comparison when considering FTA requirements all ADA trips can be considered. Because the data is easily exported to other software formats like Excel, pattern and practice analysis can be performed. For trips that have a pattern of being significantly more lengthy when compared to fixed route adjustments can be made within the Trapeze PASS system to minimize those occurrences. In the future, Van Tran is planning on testing the next version of IPA in order to compute the fixed route travel time and using that as the Maximum on Board Travel time within the PASS system
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