The Capital District Transportation Authority (CDTA) is the public transit system that services Albany, N.Y., and the surrounding communities of Rensselaer, Saratoga, and Schenectady. The organization has a total ridership of over 17 million passengers each year.
CDTA’s mission is that the organization plans, finances, implements, and delivers transit services that take people where they want to go in the Capital Region safely, efficiently, and at a reasonable cost.
Challenge
As a public transit company, CDTA’s goal is to get people where they need to go — and get them there on time. However, unpredictable factors such as traffic, weather, and fleet maintenance can get thrown into the mix.
CDTA has turned to technology in order to further optimize its operations and help it improve performance in key areas and visualizing their new ideas on dashboards which could be easily readjusted.
As part of its technology goal, CDTA wanted to use analytics in order to:
- Improve the performance of its bus routes to exceed its internal goal of having 75% on-time performance.
- Be able to gather data on its fleet and routes in order to provide the optimal schedule for its bus routes.
Use data on operator performance from the vehicle management system to better monitor and train operators.
Solution
CDTA has partnered with UBS in order to upgrade its intelligent transportation management system (ITMS). This would provide CDTA with many benefits such as a mobile app for passengers, a customer-friendly website, and new signage. As a result of this implementation, CDTA is gathering large volumes of data.
- Ticketing: This includes passenger payment and bus check-in information.
- Planning: This includes all routes and the scheduled times for each stop.
- Vehicle management system: Includes computers on each vehicle that store GPS data, actual boarding times for each stop, and operator driving behavior.
On top of these features, the new intelligent transportation management system solution also provides:
- Defining data strategy and KPIs that would be used to measure performance improvement.
- Designing dashboards with KPI owners. By working in tandem with each other, CDTA can ensure that only relevant, meaningful information is displayed on its dashboards and that its users are engaged and own their projects.
- Develop transit intelligence system by bringing together the relevant data sources in Diver Platform
- Deploying the system at CDTA. Working together, the companies focus on performance improvement and ROI using Lean Six Sigma principles.
CDTA currently has 23 KPIs that it is measuring in eight different departments. These KPIs include measurements such as ridership, revenue, cost, and on-time performance. The organization has also implemented targets for each of these KPIs that it wants to meet.