Swiftly has acquired Hopthru. The acquisition adds Hopthru’s industry-leading ridership data and analytics to Swiftly’s platform, giving agencies powerful ways to access, clean, monitor and analyze ridership data for National Transit Database (NTD) reporting, service planning, scheduling and more.
“Hopthru enables transit agencies to understand the demand and travel patterns throughout their systems. Combining these insights with Swiftly’s transit data platform offers agencies a unique solution to improve service efficiency and provide a better passenger experience,” said Cole Calhoun, Hopthru CEO. “We are thrilled to join Swiftly as the next step on our mission to help make public transportation the most compelling mode of urban travel.”
“We’re excited to see Swiftly acquire Hopthru to provide a holistic view of how transit service impacts riders," said Katie Persons, director of service planning at North County Transit District. "Combining Swiftly’s transit data platform with Hopthru’s ridership data opens up new methods of analysis and decision-making to provide the best-possible passenger experience for our community.”
Extending Swiftly’s modular transit data platform
Critical transit performance data is often difficult to retrieve and analyze due to outdated, siloed technology. Swiftly has taken a standards-based, open-data approach to providing agencies with accurate, accessible data. As a result, Swiftly’s platform has evolved as a dynamic, modular, flexible solution that agencies can adopt without replacing their existing onboard hardware.
The addition of Hopthru to the Swiftly platform extends this approach to ridership data, enabling agencies to report on ridership based on various sources of passenger count data through an independent Computer-Aided Dispatch and Automatic Vehicle Location vendor, a stand-alone automatic passenger counters (APC) system or Swiftly’s APC Connector.
Streamlining NTD reporting
All federally funded transit operations have some mechanism for counting and reporting ridership data. Hopthru supercharges and streamlines the NTD reporting process by ensuring quality and coverage of passenger count data using an agency’s existing ridership data collection methods.
Swiftly notes that for agencies with existing passenger counter data, Hopthru can connect directly with the raw data source to build a statistician-certified, expanded data set that alleviates the common pains of accessing and certifying ridership data.
“Swiftly’s central focus has always been the transit rider experience - helping agencies better communicate with passengers and run reliable, efficient service. With Hopthru’s highly accurate ridership data and powerful analytics suite, we’re truly putting the rider at the heart of the Swiftly platform,” said Jonny Simkin, Swiftly’s co-founder and CEO. “I’m excited about how our combined platforms can unlock incredible insights about the impact of service on ridership, as well as streamline NTD certification.”
