Alex Harnocz
Transit Service Planner
Akron Metro RTA
It was an opportunity to earn some extra cash freshman year at college that Akron Metro RTA Transit Service Planner Alex Harnocz got his first step in transit. He joined the bus company at Ohio State and worked through throughout his school career.
An opportunity at Metro RTA opened up to work with data, processing all of the automatic vehicle location and passenger counter information that they were about to get. His planning prowess in geographic information Systems and other software systems have been valuable in advancing plans for a downtown circulator route in Akron and reporting usage of University Zip Cards by customers.
He was the lead planner and principal author of several key in-house initiatives including a 6-year Transit Development Plan; a Transit Design Guide; an Arlington Corridor Bus Stop Consolidation Study that was selected as one of five beta test projects for the US DOT's Health in Transportation Planning Framework; and service design to initiate a new route for South Akron.
He came up with a statistical method for bus stop consolidation, married that with data from local organizations and advocacy groups to look at the statistical operational side as well as the soft relationship side of those impacts. The Transportation Research Board put out a call for proposals looking at data driven decision making and Harnocz was alongside representatives from the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority and Sound Transit.
He was a major contributor to team efforts to implement a system-wide bus stop sign replacement project and to operationalize automated vehicle location systems on Metro's fixed-route fleet, enabling such features as real-time passenger schedule information interface, on-board bus stop announcements and automated passenger counters.
“If we deliver the most frequent and the most reliable transit service we can to our area without breaking the bank then we’re being successful. While it’s easy to get knocked off track or sidetracked by grand ideas, providing the basics is really what transit customers rely upon.”
Fun Fact: Harnocz volunteers at his great-grandparents church, a historic Polish church in Cleveland.
