BIG DATA HAS
BIG
PAYOFFS
for APTA-award winning
transit agency
Contributed by the TripSpark Technologies staff
Long-time TripSpark partner Blacksburg Transit (BT)
won the American Public Transportation Association’s
(APTA) 2019 Outstanding Transit System award for North
America, in the small urban system category. Tim Witten,
ITS and special projects manager for BT talks about
how Big Data has helped improve customer experience,
planning and service.
What TripSpark products do you use?
BT was an early adopter of TripSpark's fixed route software,
Streets, and mobile data terminals. They developed their own
passenger information app and GTFS tools in-house, before they were
readily available on the market.
Access to data unlocks strategic service improvements
The most important thing for Witten and his team was that
TripSpark's solution allowed complete access to their data and
enabled them to develop their own reports.
Some agencies are not able to get access to that level of data, let
alone be able to process it, he said. BT collects data at a granular level
(11,000 data points a day) and pulls it back into their system to run
more complex analysis.
"Many programs just do canned reports," he said. "Our ability to be
able to report ridership increases and to analyze at the stop-level is
very important to us."
Because of this, BT can analyze fare type, schedule adherence, first/
last trips, passenger loads and trends, passenger revenue numbers,
boarding/alighting, and compare off-campus and on-campus trips. In
the short term, this provides invaluable insight into when headways
should be changed, what stops can be eliminated or consolidated,
and where the bus is being delayed, thereby improving schedule
adherence. In the longer term it informs strategic decisions about new
routes and increases or decreases in service on a system level.
"Data analysis is integrated into every decision we make,” Witten
said. “At many places data is separate. The most gratifying thing
is that management comes to my team for data before they make
decisions and I'm involved in the planning process.”
22 | BUSRIDE.COM | MAY / JUNE 2020
Answers to questions yet unasked
Witten is an advocate for collecting as much data as possible for
two reasons. The first is "so that I can ask questions that I’m not
aware of yet," he said. The traditional transit database is built around
tracking passengers but doesn’t provide the ability to see what
happened at a specific place and time, he said. Traditional databases
are good for answering a specific set of questions.
As a university-oriented transit system, BT's riders are very dynamic
and their location changes frequently. BT must compare annual service
levels on a week by week basis to get an accurate assessment.
The second reason for collecting all this information is to provide
accurate predicted bus arrival times for passengers. Service varies
day to day to accommodate daily changing class times, with mini
rush hours between classes. Therefore, predicted arrival times