Urban Mobility Transit Portal for 511 org

Urban Mobility Transit Portal for 511 org
Urban Mobility Transit Portal 511
Team Organizations	CivicConnect Amazon
Team Leaders	Mark Kapczynski
Participating Municipalities	San Francisco CA
Status	Launched
Document	None

Description

The goal was to build a new 511.org site to meet the growing demands of urban mobility commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area. 511.org should be the ultimate destination for commuters to plan their route to have the easiest time getting to their destination. 511.org should also incorporate all of the available data across transit agencies and systems into this single destination.

Challenges

As the Bay Area population has grown, congestion has increased. The economic and environmental impacts from this congestion demanded solutions to improve efficiency in mobility. The original 511.org system grew out of this demand. However, it was expensive to maintain and unwieldly to manage due to custom data sources and legacy software hosted on collocated hardware. MTC desired a Next Generation 511 system that provided choice and efficiency in mobility for the 8 million residents, visitors and workers it serves while leveraging the latest technology advances to reduce cost.

Solutions

The CivicConnect® Platform allows MTC to provide a web front end that integrates and manages data from over 30 transportation agencies on everything from stops to real-time departure information. These agencies include ferries, CalTrain, BART, buses, shuttles, bike routes, carpool/vanpool, and even new or planned transit such as on demand shuttles. The system also integrates available parking locations, real-time camera feeds, digital displays and more. All of this data is ingested and made available to benefit residents and visitors alike on the mobile-responsive MTC NextGen 511 site. The new site is built using industry standard data feeds and uses open source platforms hosted in the cloud. The system features a multi-modal trip planner that offers a side-by-side comparison of trip options and displays valuable information on travel time and cost, and provides tools for easy personalization- meaning each user can set individual preferences. MTC also uses the system to communicate transportation alerts and emergency information.

Performance Targets

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Measurement Methods

Together, MTC and CivicConnect are making the NextGen 511 site the Bay Area’s premier source of traveler information. Built on the CivicConnect Platform, the NextGen 511 site also provides valuable analytics for MTC to better understand system users’ transportation needs and to improve services for more efficient urban mobility. The NextGen 511 site reduced MTC’s operating costs while serving over 20,000 unique users each day. Moving forward, all of the NextGen 511 site’s custom, public and private data sources will feed into the CivicConnect Platform, so the NextGen System can serve as a single source of standardized and accessible mobility information and choices.

The 511 solution uses web metrics from Google Analytics, tracking counters to record consumer interactions/visits for engagement metrics, and system counters to measure performance and utilization rates.

Standards, Replicability, Scalability, and Sustainability

• We created a common data model to describe and manage all transit data sets. This data model can be applied to any transit agency type and size.
• The 511 solution leverages the CVC platform, common data model, and re-usable UX templates to make it easy and efficient for a deployment in another city or transit agency. CVC provides an out of the box starter of this solution in which you can get up and running in a matter of days. The whole solution is built on the Amazon AWS cloud so it can scale as large as needed.

Impacts

Help commuters, residents and visitors efficiently navigate to their destinations. Increase the utilization of all mobility options. Reduce congestion and improve sustainability

Demonstration/Deployment

The current implementation of the 511 site is now live and running at www.511.org We can demonstrate current functionality and some new features currently in development.