VIA, GoCary, and AVTA Describe Their Day-to-Day

Planners Are Good Jugglers

On a given day, a typical transit planner has many balls in the air. Service planning, public outreach, and liaising with elected officials — these all require a planner’s full attention to keep projects moving forward, and if any are dropped, it could mean a serious compromise for transit service in the community.

Here are a few examples of how agencies are using Remix to keep the juggling act of day-to-day planning flowing smoothly.

VIA (San Antonio, TX)

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San Antonio takes “Remember the Alamo” seriously. Every year, San Antonians commemorate the famous battle with Fiesta, a 10-day celebration of parades, music, and street markets across the city.

But for VIA, San Antonio’s transit agency, Fiesta means that half of the city’s routes need to be modified to ensure ongoing connections for its 150K daily riders.

In the past, runtime estimates for detour routes were time-consuming and difficult to calculate, and headways weren’t always dependable. During Fiesta, drivers could never quite tell if they were on time, and riders never knew when the bus would come.

With Remix, now VIA can sketch out their modified detour routes and quickly calculate much more accurate headways. With the new detour process in place, buses now come more dependably, and the planning team can enjoy the festivities with the rest of the city!

Antelope Valley Transit Authority (Lancaster, CA)

AVTA used to get bogged down with “what-if” questions during city council meetings. To answer board members’ questions, the AVTA team usually had to wait to crunch the numbers in the office, only to answer the question at the next meeting — one month later. The bottleneck had real effects on their plans, and the back and forth could add months to a project.

Now with Remix, AVTA can explore scenarios during board meetings in real time. The team presents proposals designed in Remix on the screen, and the board can follow along, ask specific questions, and even suggest new alignments — all while seeing how each scenario affects operating costs, vehicle requirements, and demographics served.

After one high-profile board meeting, one of AVTA’s planners said, “I can’t imagine ever going back to PowerPoint.”

GoCary (Cary, NC)

GoCary’s budget department in Cary, NC, used to find it time-consuming to draft high-level budgets for new projects. Worse, line items sometimes seemed unnecessary when taken out of context.

With Remix, now the budget department can use visualizations to explain line items in meetings with other teams. They even release the budgets to the public for comment. GoCary says the best part is that budget estimates now only take a single day.

For more examples of how to use Remix for day-to-day planning, you can read more customer stories, or just reach out at [email protected].