In 2014, WeGo began the search for a centralized system to help boost productivity while maintaining its fleet more efficiently and effectively. The ultimate goal, as with any project by the agency, was increased livability and accessible transportation for a rapidly growing city population. Since adopting the services of Vontas nearly a decade ago, WeGo has been successfully utilizing the company’ s CAD / AVL solution to do just that. However, in recent years, WeGo was looking for ways to take its fleet efficiency even further. In 2022, WeGo’ s Deputy Chief Operating Officer of Operations Systems, Dan Freudberg, approached the Vontas team in hopes of addressing some of the congestion-related travel delays slowing several of the agency’ s routes.“ Because of the frequent construction within the city, there are significant variations in travel speeds and travel times on a day-today basis, making it very difficult to manage vehicle schedules,” Freudberg said.“ We were looking at other ways that we could still deliver customers a reliable service that doesn ' t necessarily rely so heavily on a strict schedule.”“ The unique thing about what WeGo wanted to do was to expand our system beyond the yard,” said Andrea Costa, Vontas product manager.“ They wanted to bring this product to their passenger transit center, which was an entirely new use case for the product.” Prior to adopting the newest iteration of Vontas’ OnSite platform, WeGo had deployed the legacy yard management solution at its central station and downtown transit facility, but had never rolled the system out through the main bus garage due to the challenging infrastructure and complications involved with installing the platform in a heavily concrete building.“ One of the issues with tracking vehicles very accurately in and around our main transfer facility is that it doesn ' t have great GPS coverage because it is multi-level with a lot of concrete creating this urban canyon effect,” Freudberg said. WeGo wanted to ensure that it could, with a high degree of accuracy, track exactly when its vehicles were departing the facility in order to provide riders with a definite timetable reliable service and accurate bus arrival predictions. However, without knowing precisely when the vehicles were starting or ending trips from that facility, the agency was unable to accurately monitor services or make necessary adjustments. The challenge with WeGo’ s passenger transit center lies in its multilevel concrete architecture. With multiple layers of steel and cement blocking any GPS signal, predicting the arrival and departure times of vehicles becomes nearly impossible.“ When our CAD / AVL ' s GPS is blocked by all the cement and the steel, it can ' t see the sky anymore, it can’ t communicate with the satellites and that location is no longer accurate,” said Andrea Costa, product manager of OnSite.“ Dan Freudberg ' s idea was to take the technology, the antennas and the tags, install them in the passenger transit facility because they can go beneath the cement and the steel on the ceiling and read the buses that are already tagged."
BUSRIDE. COM | 11