Co-founder of AlphaRoute Honored by MIT for Advancing Operational Efficiency
Introducing "Alphie AI" - The AI Powered Transit Analytics Assistant
Published May 27, 2025
Hello world! Meet “Alphie AI,” a first-of-its-kind AI Powered Transit Analytics chatbot developed to help the transit industry in managing increasing amounts of data and the rising demand for more data scientists with expertise in transit.
AlphaRoute, a company closely linked to MIT, has a long history of providing advanced transit solutions, including NDSP Optimization, Driver Shift Optimization, and the Microtransit Planner API. Building on this legacy, we are excited to introduce Alphie AI. Our established products have been successfully utilized by major transit authorities in cities such as Boston, New York, and Chicago.
Drawing on our own experience as former transit professionals, we recognize the critical need for advanced analytics and real-time data analysis within transit agencies. These tools are essential for enabling informed decisions, improving system efficiency and the overall passenger experience. Traditional reports are insufficient in today's dynamic environment. Deeper analysis, dataset merging, and trend evaluation are necessary. However, a persistent challenge is the scarcity of personnel with the coding skills combined with transit expertise needed for in-depth analysis of extensive transit datasets.
Your transit team has the expertise to identify critical questions, but data navigation and information extraction from large datasets can be difficult and time-consuming. Welcome "Alphie AI"! This tool empowers your team to use natural language to quickly retrieve metrics for meetings or create in-depth analysis for complex problem-solving and well informed, data-driven decisions. Alphie AI can provide you with precise statistics, tables, and fancy plots from your huge transit datasets in seconds. For example, have you ever wondered how to merge operations and automatic vehicle location data to get a new metric you’d love to show on your board presentation? With Alphie AI, the answer is just one question away. Simply ask!
But you may be wondering, is it secure? Will my data be exposed publicly? Alphie AI leverages large language models (like chatGPT) but is specifically designed to never allow your confidential and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to leave our models. Connect all your datasets with confidence, knowing your data security is maintained.
Curious to learn more? Click here to request a demo, or email us at info@alpharoute.ivtest.isolly.com, to see Alphie AI in action. Contact us today!
ONE MILLION Paratransit Trips Optimized for the MBTA in Boston
Published November 12, 2024
MBTA The Ride pioneered the use of TNCs in paratransit back in 2016. Since then, the agency has been a reference nationwide on how to efficiently use non-dedicated service providers (NDSP). As NDSP options and NDSP ridership grew for paratransit riders, the MBTA continued to search for tools that could help its scheduling and dispatch teams optimize paratransit service across different transportation options.
In 2023, the MBTA selected AlphaRoute’s innovative tool, NDSP Optimization, to daily optimize trips across multiple transportation options. NDSP Optimization looks at all trips scheduled for tomorrow to define which trips shall be kept in the dedicated service and which eligible trips shall be outsourced to each NDSP provider. It also assigns eligible NDSP trips to the most cost effective NDSP provider available for that trip. Our web-based optimization tool augments the performance of legacy paratransit scheduling systems to improve service, maximize efficiency, and generate substantial cost savings. It is also fully customizable with local operational parameters and contractual requirements.
So far in 2024, AlphaRoute has optimized, on average, over 100,000 trips per month with extremely low errors and very high availability–over 99.9% of all trips are optimized. Last month we were super excited to celebrate with the MBTA The Ride the mark of 1 million trips optimized in 2024. This is a relentless and efficient daily job from our algorithms to find the best daily service mix for the MBTA paratransit services.
The implementation of the NDSP Optimization tool saved hours of work per day for the scheduling team. Before utilizing our tool, the team would have to manually look for the best trips to outsource. Now, they can have the best trips available to them in a click of a button, optimizing more than 4,000 paratransit trips in just over a minute. The financial benefit of this tool for the MBTA is estimated to be several million dollars per year. The average net savings per trip outsourced using NDSP Optimization is around $22 dollars
Do your operations utilize non-dedicated service providers? Do you want to efficiently deploy NDSPs? 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, email us at info@alpharoute.ivtest.isolly.com
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.
The Latest in Paratransit: Optimizing the Use of Non-Dedicated Service Providers
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!
