Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
Watch and learn how to make use of the essential features of Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) software. With a click of the mouse, managing vehicles is effortless and stress-free. Click here to watch the demo.
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
If your transit agency is new to fare collection technology, or are looking to upgrade your current fare collection equipment, here is a webcast you might want to check out. On March 29 2010, APTA is putting on Fare Collection 101, a live video- and- audio stream webcast directly from the APTA 2010 Fare Collection Workshop in San Diego, CA. Listen to industry experts weigh in on the new options out there for fare collection technology. Hear what questions the on-site audience is asking, or submit your own to be answered directly by the panel. Click here for more information about the webcast.
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
We’re very excited at The Fleet Beat about a new webinar we’ve put together. Hosted by Chris Pettigrew, our resident transit specialist, the webinar will present an affordable scheduling option for small/medium sized transit agencies. Most transit agencies are interested in taking advantage of Trip Planning with Google Maps™ Transit . However, smaller agencies are quickly running into a number of issues when attempting to implement this— the prohibitive cost of most scheduling software and a lack of money/staff to name a couple. This webinar will address these issues as well as give you a glimpse of how much easier scheduling software can make your life. Please click here to register to join us on October 28, at 1:30 pm MDT
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Many articles have been written about the advantages of AVL systems in fixed route transit agencies. While AVL does come with a host of benefits, including predicting next bus arrival times, lofty claims about a rider walking out their door 30 seconds before the arrival of their bus simply isn’t the case in most cities. Agencies salivate at the thought of people knowing exactly when their bus is going to arrive, but it’s important to realize that once implemented, AVL delivers predictions and not guaranteed arrival times.
The big question is why? Riders may wonder why, with all the GPS hardware and software, they can’t know exactly where their bus is every second of the day. And, why their PDA says the next bus will be at the stop in two minutes, yet they’re still standing there two minutes after the fact.
To answer this it’s important to understand how arrival predictions are constructed. First and foremost, while a vehicle may know where it is at every given second, it can’t ‘send back’ its location to in-office and online software systems every second. Not only would this incur huge costs (due to the volume of data being constantly sent), but data providers simply don’t allow it (as it would clog up their entire data network). As a result, software packages have to make an educated guess as to where a vehicle is based on the location information it does receive. Typically, vehicle location reports are sent every one to three minutes. If we assume an average vehicle speed of 12 miles/hour, this translates to anywhere from 0.2 to 0.6 miles of distance covered by the vehicle between location reports. That’s 0.2 to 0.6 miles during which the software has to ‘guess’ the vehicle’s location.
In most cases, software applications are able to predict arrival times based on a number of pieces of information:
• Last location received and speed of the vehicle
• Historical traffic and speed information for a given road section
• Distance from the target
• Current traffic information
All of this information does aid in arrival predictions, however, it will never be able to exactly predict an arrival time. Road conditions may vary from calculated values due to accidents, weather, construction, organized events, bad traffic, etc. For example, no software can predict when a vehicle in gridlock is going to start moving again. Sure, the vehicle may only be half a block from its next stop, but it may not move for an extended period of time.
Agencies looking for ‘next stop’ arrival time prediction functionality need to recognize that this information is a prediction—not the absolute truth. This holds true regardless of the software provider chosen.
