Fort Worth, Tex.
Paul J Ballard
President/CEO
Fort Worth Transportation Authority
A key component of a successful transit system is not just utilizing best practices, but also developing new ones. Over the last few years, we have used that model as a guiding force at the Fort Worth Transportation Authority.
We believe customer service and the rider experience are so important that we have found new ways to enhance those areas. One of the first practices put into play was to hire bus operators who are friendly and focused on serving the customers. Whether or not candidates have a commercial driver’s license is not essential. We would rather provide the training to the right candidates rather than hiring drivers with years of experience, but who are not good with people.
One of our best practices is our communication system that we use to inform drivers about important information. We use digital monitors to push route changes, detours, wellness activities, performance measurements and other timely information. Additionally our operator assignment module is configured to print out important notices and work assignments when the operator clocks in to his or her assignment. All of these systems help us to keep the operators better informed which we believe equips the driver to more effectively operate our services.
All of our employees use our transit system and take a survey at least once a month. The purpose is twofold: We have an opportunity to compliment or make a correction, and our employees experience our organization from the customer’s perspective and can better talk about our services.
Our senior leadership team meets weekly and then takes a group bus ride to lunch as part of our quality assurance program. This offers a chance for us to partake in different routes each week and to talk with customers and share information while we are on the bus or at a stop.
As we began implementing our master plan last year, we divided the city into quadrants to tackle them region by region. We started in the north quadrant, where we extended service, straightened routes for better efficiency and increased frequency. We are now turning to the west, where we plan to increase frequency and modify routes to provide better access to downtown and to education and employment opportunities.
In the last year, we have implemented new websites. One is our main website of www.FWTA.org and the other is for our TEXRail commuter rail line, www.TEXRail.com. The 27-mile TEXRail route will run from downtown Fort Worth to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport’s Terminal B and will be open for revenue service in late 2018.
To keep customers informed about TEXRail progress and other important news, we have increased our social media presence, which has yielded higher engagement and rising numbers of followers.
Other customer-friendly implementations include the NextBus app to give riders real-time arrival and departure information, new fare boxes to decrease dwell time and a new paint scheme to give our buses a fresh, modern look.
As we continue to grow and improve, we will continue implementing best practices and seeking new ways to provide quality service to more people in more places.
San Bernardino, Calif.
Jeremiah Bryant
Service Planning Manager
Omnitrans
In September 2017, Omnitrans extended service hours on sbX, the agency’s first Bus Rapid Transit line, starting service one hour earlier and running two hours later. By utilizing efficient scheduling practices, the marginal cost was only fuel and maintenance expenses. Offsetting savings cover the rest. To see how Omnitrans got there, one needs to go back to sbX’s initial service plan.
Omnitrans launched sbX 2014 and has been recognized by the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) as a bronze-rated BRT. sbX has 5.4 miles of dedicated center-running lanes, level boarding, TSP and a host of additional BRT features.
At launch, sbX service characteristics were developed to closely match small starts grant requirements: 10-minute peak/15-minute off-peak headways with 14 hours of service span, all while not increasing the operating budget by more than five percent.
To become a sbX driver, coach operators applied for a separate classification. While this came with a $2 per hour premium pay, it gave Omnitrans control over driver quality and the ability to fully roster coach operator work.
Omnitrans initially delivered sbX with a pure headway management system rather than a traditional schedule. It was designed to mitigate bus bunching by keeping 10 to 15 minute space between buses. Customers were provided with real-time information, estimated travel times between stations and frequency by time of day.
While the headway management system worked great on paper, the outcome experienced was greater variability in run times on sbX than on any other route in the system. Even after adjusting for time of day, run times varied by as much as 30 percent. To cover this variation, hold time & unscheduled overtime costs mounted.
At the same time, in a customer survey 89 percent of customers indicated they would ride more often if there was a regular published schedule. Many respondents indicated they had difficulty planning trips without a firm schedule.
As a result, Omnitrans moved away from headway management and published a schedule with fewer than normal time-points. Each mid-route time point was asterisked stating that sbX may depart five-minutes earlier than the posted time. This was so that the agency didn’t take the “rapid” out of BRT.
This small scheduling change gave Operations management the ability to tightly control internal issues impacting run times. Run time variance fell by half. Service reliability improved. Ridership on sbX grew 6.3 percent following the change, while system-wide ridership fell 9.0 percent.
The schedulers were able to rein in the schedule. Eliminating odd things like scheduled hold time that were used to account for the variance. In total, there were 102 pay hours per week scattered over 24 shifts for things other than platform, sign-on/off, or travel time. They were scattered in a way that did not allow for fewer shifts.
The early decision to roster new service allowed for a mix of longer and shorter shifts to be developed and spread between operators. In doing so, 85 of those pay hours were used to expand service by three hours per day. Since they were being paid anyway, the marginal operator cost of the span expansion was effectively zero, while the public got three more hours per day of service.
St. Cloud, Minn.
Kevin Wood
SVP Manufacturing and Facilities
New Flyer Industries
As North America’s leading bus and motor coach manufacturer, improving efficiency lies at the heart of New Flyer’s business. We have 5,800 employees across the continent in 31 locations, many of whom touch our products daily to advance a new generation of transit technology that will make cities smarter, more connected and more sustainable. We also offer the widest range of powertrains and bus types of any other bus maker here. That’s a lot of hands, a lot of parts, and a tremendous amount of complexity. Without strong processes for tracking and improving efficiency, a few small mistakes could lead to lost time, defects or even chaos.
Our work began in 2008 with the launch of our award-winning Operational Excellence (OpEx) program, investing in operations and change management for sustainable processes. Its vision is to provide and maintain a safe, clean and efficient working environment for all employees while ensuring that New Flyer is the most efficient producer through first-time quality and defined processes and procedures. Since 2012, that process has evolved through an approach known as LEAN Sigma. If you’ve ever worked in manufacturing, you might have heard of both of this term.
New Flyer’s OpEx program uses statistics and process controls to target areas where defects can occur, and relentlessly root them out so that problems aren’t just fixed once, but prevented from happening again. LEAN manufacturing dates back to the 1950's, but has evolved steadily since then as manufacturers across different industries openly share their learnings. It’s not just the knowledge of lean manufacturing — such as keeping parts inventories low and at point of use, or making sure assemblers have every needed tool and the required technical data and work instructions within arm’s reach — but the ethos of an ongoing battle against waste that makes LEAN manufacturing key to our commitment of delivering innovations across the entire lifecycle of a transit bus.
If you walk inside our factories, you will immediately see visual proof of our commitment to safety and efficiency. We use Andon systems — think of a scoreboard in a sports hall – that show everyone on the floor at a glance how well the production lines are working. If someone has a problem, they can send a request from their station and the Andon system would alert associates to where help needs to go.
The immediate and continuing results experienced across our business have a ripple effect that benefits society as well. The efficiencies we experience free up resources, time and capabilities to continue New Flyer’s cycle of innovation and further contribute to key advancements in infrastructure, manufacturing and job creation.
One small example of another process I can share is known as 5S. It stands for a five-word concept about how to keep a workspace organized — “sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain.” It’s designed to reduce clutter and the time wasted looking for essential parts through better visual controls. They seem like small steps, but taken together, and applied across the business, they produce impressive gains. 5S applies equally to the shop floor as it does the office and support areas.
None of these philosophies work without the buy-in of our team members throughout the business, and we invest in training on these approaches to ensure everyone sees how they benefit all of us. After 87 years of building buses, we know that bringing about the future of mass transit requires a dedication to quality and efficiency that’s also built to last.
Cincinnati, Ohio
Christina Bock
Director, Operations Support
First Transit
With a history in the North American transportation industry that’s broad and deep, First Transit has seen the impact of the introduction of technology into the transportation environment over the past 5 to 10 years. Technology has brought rapid change and, with that change, a great opportunity to use it to improve the efficiency of systems throughout North America. The pace at which technology entered the industry, however, presented many challenges and questions from our transit agency clients.
Agencies want the efficiencies and creature comforts technology brings but often hesitate to implement solutions due to the complexity and cost of doing so. First Transit assists our agency partners by applying our experience, our in-house expertise and the strength of our supplier network, to find the right combination of solutions to drive efficiencies in route planning, scheduling, operating, and communicating both to drivers and passengers. We simplify implementation of the right solutions for a particular operation and ensure the full value is achieved.
Key to this work has been the establishment of a team focused on providing technology services, a group of First Transit professionals uniquely able to supplement region and location personnel efforts. Starting with a technology review, our team identifies what works well at a location and what needs improvement and reconciles findings against the agency’s wish list. Next, the team creates a custom technology plan to help the transit agency achieve its strategic objectives while also considering financial and resource constraints. Work resulting from the technology plan can be project managed by First Transit and often includes software implementation, configuration, hardware installation and software training efforts. Services may also include training or retraining on standard operating procedures and industry best practices, which can be used to understand and improve efficiency of all processes from reservations to scheduling and dispatching.
This year, First Transit has placed considerable focus in the area of schedule optimization and now offers scheduling services to transit agencies. The software provides the transit agency multiple scheduling scenarios from which they make a selection to put into service. These scenarios consider driver levels, overtime, vehicle coverage and more, to provide schedules that are well-suited for each driver-vehicle combination. They can be dynamically adjusted by taking into account necessary constraints and requirements like a driver’s personal schedule or even changing weather and road conditions. This service is provided by First Transit and does not require the agency to purchase schedule optimization software of their own, providing efficiency as well as considerable savings.
Today, there is a plethora of technology solutions designed with transit agencies in mind — from route planning and schedule optimization to passenger communications and reporting. The challenge is knowing which solution to choose without making a costly misstep. First Transit has helped an agencies shorten the distance to excellence simply by fine tuning software settings and providing refresher training for staff. At other locations, we’ve recommended or created whole new solutions for their back-office operations or installed hardware on their vehicles with a minimum of down time. In a business where minutes really do count, we’re helping agencies maintain or achieve their best performance.
New York, N.Y.
Catherine Chardon
CEO
RATP Dev North America
For help answering this modern-day question, let’s turn to Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous 19th century detective, Sherlock Holmes. In Doyle’s first novel, “A Study in Scarlet”, Holmes declared “it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” It’s a lesson that applies today as transit agencies and their private sector partners, try to determine why mass transit ridership is down nationwide, and what they can do to reverse that trend by improving efficiencies in route planning and scheduling, operations and vehicle maintenance. The first step is to overhaul the traditional data collection and analysis process.
The old data gathering methods only give insight on parts of modern-day mobility behaviors, such as people commute to and from work every day, but that only represents about one-third of a person’s daily mobility. Of course, those methods were used for collecting ridership data for their rapidity and for the possibility to include qualitative data into numbers.
But today, the technology exists to collect and analyze ridership data in real-time from multiple sources. Installing small, inexpensive sensors on the doors of buses to track riders as they get on and off and the fleet as it is operated can provide detailed information around where demand for bus service rises and falls depending on location, day of the week and time of day.
That’s not to say there isn’t value to historical data gathered via traditional methods. Operators should be using their long history of qualitative data jointly with modern analytics to create more complete modern empirical data to be leveraged. This enables route planners to do more than mass transit for people commute to and from work, and address the market’s much broader and individual needs for mobility and commercial savviness comes with it. Thanks to these joint methods operators can optimize routes and re-direct buses as needed to address anticipated variations in rider demand.
Moving beyond installing sensors on bus doors, imagine the possibilities of a fleet of “smart” buses connected with the cities networks themselves. GPS devices on-board each bus can communicate with sensors in traffic lights to trigger green lights as buses approach. This kind of real-time route and vehicle monitoring capability can help address long-standing issues of traffic congestion and a lack of bus-only lanes in cities slowing service. Additionally, engine performance monitoring systems can provide maintenance staff with up-to-date status reports and alerts to preventive steps they can take to reduce repair costs and vehicle downtime.
The success of mass transit cannot only rely on technical advances alone, but must include the joint work of agencies and operators who each do their parts to bring what customers wanted. That is key to transit agencies moving beyond only sending buses and trains along predetermined routes and become providers of flexible, optimized transit services that elevate the rider’s experience.
St. Cloud, Minn.
Kevin Wood
SVP Manufacturing and Facilities
New Flyer Industries
As North America’s leading bus and motor coach manufacturer, improving efficiency lies at the heart of New Flyer’s business. We have 5,800 employees across the continent in 31 locations, many of whom touch our products daily to advance a new generation of transit technology that will make cities smarter, more connected and more sustainable. We also offer the widest range of powertrains and bus types of any other bus maker here. That’s a lot of hands, a lot of parts, and a tremendous amount of complexity. Without strong processes for tracking and improving efficiency, a few small mistakes could lead to lost time, defects or even chaos.
Our work began in 2008 with the launch of our award-winning Operational Excellence (OpEx) program, investing in operations and change management for sustainable processes. Its vision is to provide and maintain a safe, clean and efficient working environment for all employees while ensuring that New Flyer is the most efficient producer through first-time quality and defined processes and procedures. Since 2012, that process has evolved through an approach known as LEAN Sigma. If you’ve ever worked in manufacturing, you might have heard of both of this term.
New Flyer’s OpEx program uses statistics and process controls to target areas where defects can occur, and relentlessly root them out so that problems aren’t just fixed once, but prevented from happening again. LEAN manufacturing dates back to the 1950s, but has evolved steadily since then as manufacturers across different industries openly share their learnings. It’s not just the knowledge of lean manufacturing – such as keeping parts inventories low and at point of use, or making sure assemblers have every needed tool and the required technical data and work instructions within arm’s reach – but the ethos of an ongoing battle against waste that makes LEAN manufacturing key to our commitment of delivering innovations across the entire lifecycle of a transit bus.
If you walk inside our factories, you will immediately see visual proof of our commitment to safety and efficiency. We use Andon systems – think of a scoreboard in a sports hall – that show everyone on the floor at a glance how well the production lines are working. If someone has a problem, they can send a request from their station and the Andon system would alert associates to where help needs to go.
The immediate and continuing results experienced across our business have a ripple effect that benefits society as well. The efficiencies we experience free up resources, time and capabilities to continue New Flyer’s cycle of innovation and further contribute to key advancements in infrastructure, manufacturing and job creation.
One small example of another process I can share is known as 5S. It stands for a five-word concept about how to keep a workspace organized – “sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain.” It’s designed to reduce clutter and the time wasted looking for essential parts through better visual controls. They seem like small steps, but taken together, and applied across the business, they produce impressive gains. 5S applies equally to the shop floor as it does the office and support areas.
None of these philosophies work without the buy-in of our team members throughout the business, and we invest in training on these approaches to ensure everyone sees how they benefit all of us. After 87 years of building buses, we know that bringing about the future of mass transit requires a dedication to quality and efficiency that’s also built to last.
