Public Transit Blog

A Location Strategy

Welcome to the 2020 Esri User Conference.  First, I would like to introduce the Transit Sales Team.  Justin Kruizenga is the Transit Account Executive, and I am Jay Hagen, and I support Justin as a Solution Engineer. We are part of a broader Transportation Team and have the support of Esri Professional and Training Services, among others.  

As part of our virtual conference offering, we wanted to provide you with some resources for developing a location strategy at your public transit agency.  Location is a major part of transit operations, and ArcGIS provides solutions for meeting location challenges.  Some questions you may need to answer include:

• Where are my buses/trains right now?  Which ones are running behind schedule?  What impacts on-time performance?
  
• How can I do targeted outreach to customers and potential riders?
• Where are my bus stops?  What amenities are at each stop?  What is the condition of those amenities?
  How do I direct and coordinate my field workforce?  Not only bus operators, but maintenance crews?
• How can I ensure the agency meets FTA requirements for accessibility, safety, and equitable service? 

A fully developed location strategy provides tools and applications to the appropriate user to answer these and other spatially-oriented questions. In this blog post, we will provide information about configurable solution offerings, customer examples, white papers, and information about the System of Engagement, which provides the roadmap for a location strategy.  

Solutions

Transit solution offerings are configurations of ArcGIS technology to meet common transit business needs.  A solution can also include training and services to stand up the technology in your organization, providing a turn-key solution. Here are some examples of solutions provided by Esri that can be leveraged by a transit agency. 

ArcGIS Solutions 

ArcGIS Solutions are provided as free-to-use configurable templates that solve common industry business needs.  The Solutions Team at Esri partners with ArcGIS users to identify these needs and build the application configurations. Solution templates for state and local government, emergency management, and utilities have been around for a while now, but we have recently released solutions for transit.  Not only are these templates free to ArcGIS users, they are fully supported by Esri technical support and can be quickly deployed with the Solutions Deployment Tool for ArcGIS Pro or the new ArcGIS Solutions App.

Transit Safety Management Solution (SMS)

The Transit Safety Management Solution is suite of applications that help your agency meet FTA compliance requirements for Safety Management Systems (SMS) under Public Transportation Agency Safety Plan (PTASP) regulations. Meeting FTA requirements is important, but this solution goes beyond meeting compliance and provides tools to engage your entire organization in the safety process and advanced spatial analysis to help you prioritize corrective action. 

Community Engagement Solution

Communicating plans and soliciting feedback from the public can be a big challenge, especially now with COVID-19 making in-person interaction difficult (this is a virtual conference, after all).  The Community Engagement Solution helps your agency adapt to changing communication trends, increase public participation in the planning process, and build community consensus.   

ADA Stop Solution  

The ADA Stop Solution solves common field data collection workflow issues.  The solution allows you to coordinate bus stop collection assignments, collect and quickly assess data for ADA compliance, track progress, and perform analysis to prioritize bus stop improvements.  Because these are configurable applications, the ADA solution can be configured to meet any field data collection workflow. 

AVL/Tracking Solution

Real-time situational awareness is important when on-time performance is at stake. The AVL Solution taps into your agency's AVL to provide real-time location monitoring of your vehicles.  Knowing where vehicles are located is not useful without the context of what is happening around them, so we provide live traffic, Waze alerts, weather, traffic cameras, road construction status, and other variables to provide a comprehensive traffic management dashboard.  What's more, historical data can be stored for analysis to help you discover patterns that may effect on-time performance. An example of a real-time dashboard for Honolulu can be found here.  Keep in mind that this is using live operational data, so if you're looking at this at 3 A.M. Hawaii Time (GMT -10), you may not see much happening. 

Customer Examples

Although our Transit Team at Esri is relatively new, we do have transit agency successes to share.  

• New York MTA uses ArcGIS to help manage over $1 trillion in assets and coordinate repair efforts on the system.
• Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) uses a location strategy with ArcGIS to efficiently provide rail service to 450,000 daily passengers. 
• Valley Metro in Phoenix uses the Safety Management Solution to meet FTA requirements for SMS. 
• Chicago's Regional Transportation Authority provides oversight for Chicagoland transit providers. As part of communicating COVID-related service challenges to the public and political stakeholders, they configured a COVID-19 dashboard with ridership and funding information.
• The Regional Transportation Alliance (RTA) of Southwestern Pennsylvania is a coalition of public and private partners in the Pittsburgh area that facilitates an ongoing regional discussion to support the realization of additional transportation projects that will enhance regional connectivity, competitiveness and quality of life.  As part of that communication effort, they have configured over 50 (wow!) ArcGIS Story Maps to communicate various projects and plans, including this Story Map for the Imagine Transportation 2.0 vision.
• We've curated a gallery of public-facing transit applications. Here you can browse applications that other transit agencies are using to communicate with the public.

System of Engagement

For those that want to develop a location strategy, we are commonly asked "how do we move forward?', "where do we start", or "how do we create a plan?"  To help answer those questions, we offer the System of Engagement.  The System of Engagement includes a business needs and technical track discovery.  As a result, you are provided with a plan that documents the needs that were uncovered, and the application(s) needed to move ahead. Because it is your plan, you may choose to implement the recommendations in-house at your own pace or use Esri Professional Service or an Esri technology partner to implement the plan. We have done a number of these engagements with Transit Agencies and DOTs throughout the US.  A list of some applications that came out of those transit engagements can be found here. For more information about the System of Engagement, check out the video available at the "Smart Mobility-Transit" virtual kiosk at the UC. 

The Transit Team hopes you enjoy the User Conference this year.  We would love to hear from you.  Please check out the Transportation virtual kiosk during UC or reach out directly.  You can reach us at transit@esri.com.   

For transit-related sessions and events at this year's UC, check out this flyer. 

As a former analyst in a transit planning department, I know that communicating plans and gathering feedback from the public can be a major challenge.  Adding to that challenge is the current pandemic situation, which makes in-person engagements unlikely, at least for the near future.  To help transit agencies meet these challenges, we developed the Community Engagement Solution.  This solution allows you to:

• Adapt to changing communication trends
• Increase public participation in the planning process; and
• Build community consensus

The solution includes configurable Hub pages to disseminate information and schedule events, both in-person and virtual.  Surveys and crowd-sourcing applications are available to gather feedback with a dashboard to monitor your engagement efforts.  Community Analyst is included to help identify target populations and develop marketing strategies to engage a wide cross-section of your community.  

The Transit Community Engagement Solution is available as a package that can be deployed by Esri Professional Services---it includes the software, configuration of Hub and surveys, and knowledge transfer---and can modernize your engagement approach with a set of flexible, configurable applications.

If you'd like to know more about the Community Engagement Solution or would like to see a demonstration, contact us at transit@esri.com. 

On July 19, 2018, FTA published the Public Transportation Agency Safety Plan (PTASP) Final Rule, which requires certain operators of US public transportation systems that receive federal funds under FTA's Urbanized Area Formula Grants to develop safety plans that include the processes and procedures to implement Safety Management Systems (SMS).  Under the rule, the PTASP and SMS are to be implemented by transit agencies no later than July 20, 2020, although the FTA continues to review options to provide relief for meeting requirements in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. [edit: FTA has extended the requirement deadline until December 31, 2020]

A Safety Management System is comprised of four basic components:

1. Safety Risk Management
2. Safety Assurance
3. Safety Promotion
4. Safety Management Policy

The Esri Safety Management Solution is a comprehensive, integrated solution that supports the first three components listed above (Risk Management, Assurance, Promotion). In implementing the Esri Safety Management Solution, you are supporting the fourth component, Safety Management Policy, and creating a culture of safety in your agency.

The Esri Safety Management Solution is a turn-key solution providing a suite of applications that: 

• Meets FTA requirements for Transit SMS
• Engages your entire organization in the safety process
• Analyzes your data to prioritize corrective action

It includes applications for reporting hazards and events, assigning assessment and mitigation, a report generator for FTA accident event reporting, dashboards and analytical applications for monitoring and evaluating progress, and a Safety Hub site for communication to agency staff.  The video below gives a quick overview of the solution.

For more information about meeting your agency's PTASP requirement before the July deadline, contact the Esri Transit Team at transit@esri.com.

[Edit: FTA has extended the PTASP compliance deadline to December 31, 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.]

Knowing where a bus is located in real-time is a valuable bit of information for a transit operations center.  Knowing where a bus is along with traffic conditions, road hazards, road construction, and current weather conditions is even more powerful.  Storing all of that information to analyze past trends to make schedule adjustments brings the process full circle.

With ArcGIS, all of this is possible.  Currently, with ArcGIS Enterprise components, you can consume AVL feeds, weather information, Waze & Esri traffic data, and many other data feeds into a real-time Operations Dashboard.  With the ArcGIS spatiotemporal big data store, you can store these events for analysis.  However, in the near future, Esri will be able to offer these capabilities as a cloud service.  That's right, no Enterprise infrastructure needed.  We're calling it ArcGIS Analytics for IoT, and I believe it will be a game changer for the transit agency that wants real-time awareness with big data capabilities, but may not have the resources to deploy Enterprise.  Check out the video below to see an example of how you might leverage your agency's AVL feed.

For more information, contact Esri's Transit Team: transit@esri.com 

I am often asked about auto-generation of notifications when a condition is met.  Using webhooks, you can integrate Survey123 with a wide variety of web applications. 

In the video below, I cover a simple, but powerful scenario.  Bus operators are required to complete a pre-trip inspection of their vehicle.  Typically, this inspection is done on paper.  If an issue if found, the operator will need to find somebody to take quick corrective action.  Using Survey123 to complete the pre-trip inspection, you can immediately notify maintenance personnel of inspection issues, saving the agency time, and getting vehicles on the street quickly.

If you have any questions about this workflow, or have ideas for other tasks that could be tackled with webhooks, please reach out the Transit Transportation Team at transit@esri.com.

Reporting of accidents or incidents involving your transit fleet is a component of SMS under Federal PTASP regulations.  Typically, incident information is collected in a static form--the information is then transcribed into other systems, and location information is not readily available.  Using Survey123, Esri gives you the ability to collect incident information in a smart-form application.  Because the information you collect is geographically enabled, you can monitor incident information in a dashboard and do advanced spatial analysis to find trends in your data.

[Edit: The incident reporting application is now part of the comprehensive Transit Safety Management Solution (SMS).  To learn about the Safety Management Solution, visit: https://community.esri.com/community/arcgis-for-public-transit/blog/2020/04/20/transit-safety-manage...]

Many transit agencies have to route a fleet of vehicles to assigned orders on a regular basis.  Perhaps you have a list of regularly assigned bus stops hand off to cleaning crews or maybe you need to create daily assignments for demand responsive transit.  With ArcGIS Pro, you can build efficient route assignments for your operators and crews.  You can set rules about working hours, pickup windows, breaks, and other routing restrictions.  The best part is that you can do all of that with ready-to-use web services integrated into ArcGIS Pro--no need for any extensions or a routable network dataset.  And with the latest release of Navigator, you can use Network Analyst tools to share your routes so that drivers have turn-by-turn directions.

The video gives a quick overview of the tools used to create and share routes.  More information about the Vehicle Routing Problem is available in the ArcGIS Pro documentation.