Optimizing the Largest Paratransit System in North America
Published Oct 15, 2024
Out of 150 applicants from around the world, AlphaRoute was proudly selected as a finalist in the prestigious Transit Tech Lab (TTL) “Resilience Challenge”. We worked side by side with the New York City Transit (NYCT) team on, “How can we build a more resilient and adaptive transit system?”, with a specific focus on optimizing the NYCT paratransit system.
New York City Transit–the largest paratransit system in North America–recently announced that it reached an astonishing record of 38,800 scheduled rides in a day! Yes, in one day! There are very few routing software in the world that can truly perform such a large and complex optimization.
Most paratransit software available in the market need serious shortcuts or an excessive amount of time to handle this amount of information. For example, NYCT's current legacy software needs over 40 minutes to schedule a regular day of operations, let alone a record one. AlphaRoute delivered a 35,000 paratransit optimization trip with real-time traffic in under 10 minutes and, to future proof it, we demonstrated to NYCT our ability to schedule 100,000 trips in a very reasonable amount of time.
Okay, but how efficient was AlphaRoute’s optimization? AlphaRoute applied its routing optimization software to seven days of paratransit service, which covered over 200,000 paratransit trips. The software was customized to incorporate all major operational rules and service requirements. Full results are published in the Transit Tech Lab report here. AlphaRoute’s software increased the total number of trips per hour (productivity) by 53% on average, which could reduce the total number of trips sent to brokers by 11.7%.
What about the savings? AlphaRoute estimated that if their optimization solution was scaled across New York City Transit’s entire paratransit portfolio, they could save $18M-38M annually. AlphaRoute NDSP Optimization’s ability to maximize efficiency in dedicated vehicle routes and non-dedicated service provider trips (Brokers) avoided thousands of additional broker trips per day. A direct saving to NYCT’s operational budget!
Do you run paratransit operations with a legacy software? Do you want to quickly maximize productivity and savings? We would be happy to provide a demo with real data for your organization. To learn more about our software or schedule a demonstration, click here, or email us at info@alpharoute.ivtest.isolly.com.
