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The Future of Decision Making in Transit

Transit agencies have a wealth of information stored within their back-office databases. However, it can be difficult for managers to use this information to make informed and timely business decisions. In many cases their plight can be attributed to an inability to access meaningful performance information because of a lack of data integration across the transit enterprise. It is clear that more accurate information leads to better decision making but unfortunately oft inaccessible back-office transit data acts as a roadblock.

Transit agencies often spend significant time and money on data integration projects in an effort to connect their data such that they can use it for performance reporting purposes. Converting “data silos” to “data marts” is a common strategy used on transit data integration projects. These integration projects are often performed as one-off solutions that do not leverage the effort of other transit organizations performing similar data integration tasks themselves. The end result is that transits end up building highly customized solutions that cannot be packaged and re-deployed at other agencies.

Most transit agencies in North America have similar decision making and performance measurement needs and consequently, they typically have the same core back-office databases: scheduling, planning, revenue, operations dispatch, payroll, customer service, maintenance, finance, safety and security, AVL and APC. By leveraging the efforts of other transit agencies and implementing standard, package-able and re-deployable transit intelligence solutions, transit agencies can accelerate their data integration projects, reduce the time and money spend on integration and build a solid baseline for custom enterprise data integration.

Hence while data consolidation and systems integration are becoming a necessity in order to meaningfully access the information required to make better decisions, the future of decision making lies in the ability of transit agencies to implement transit intelligence solutions that build on the efforts of their peers.

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