Software companies in the paratransit industry have announced the importance of “integrating” or “cross-dispatching” to Transportation Network Companies (TNC) platforms such as Uber, Lyft, Taxis and others as Non-Dedicated Service Providers (NDSP) in an effort to increase efficiency and ease driver shortage. It is clear that dispatchers’ ability to seamlessly send an eligible trip to a TNC platform is valuable and it will help with the overall system integration and data integrity, but there are still many questions regarding how to go about this, such as:

1) How do we gain operational efficiency in this process?
2) Which trips should be shifted daily?
3) What other opportunities are we missing in this process?

The answer to these questions is NDSP optimization, i.e. use state-of-the-art algorithms to daily select the best eligible trips to be shifted to NDSPs in order to maximize performance for the entire system. Relying on Schedulers and Dispatchers to manually do this work is extremely time consuming and inefficient, independent of the software you use. Transit agencies’ use of inappropriate and outdated scheduling methods, such as trip filtering and outsourcing “left-over” trips from scheduling algorithms batches, are also inefficient. So, what exactly is the solution to achieve NDSP optimization? AlphaRoute!

AlphaRoute has pioneered a new software approach to respond to this challenge, strongly advocating the utilization of NDSP, including but not limited to TNCs, to improve paratransit efficiency. We have innovated and successfully implemented a modern NDSP Optimization software solution in two of the top five transit agencies in the country. AlphaRoute’s NDSP Optimization algorithm optimizes all scheduled trips, creating the most efficient dedicated vehicle routes, while also selecting the best trips to be “outsourced” to NDSP in order to maximize efficiency for your entire paratransit operations. This tool is a real breakthrough in vehicle routing optimization! And we do this independent of the legacy scheduling software you currently use.

At the MBTA in Boston (also a pioneer in the use of TNC in paratransit), we have optimized over 800,000 trips so far in 2024, saving the dispatch group approximately 4-5 hours each day, and this optimization is estimated to save over $5M per year.

At New York City Transit, the largest paratransit system in North America and one of the largest in the world, we have optimized over 40,000 trips per day into dedicated vehicles routes and non-dedicated service providers trips (Brokers). We have delivered a 50% increase in  productivity (trips/hour) and we are expecting to save New York City Transit an astonishing $18 million dollars per year, if NDSP optimization was scaled across New York City Transit’s entire paratransit portfolio.

Do you want to take advantage of our state of the art software? We would be happy to provide a demo with real data for your organization in less than a week. To learn more about our software or schedule a demonstration, Click here, or email us at info@alpharoute.ivtest.isolly.com!