Transforming Paratransit: How AlphaRoute & MBTA Raised Efficiency to Win METRO’s Innovative Solutions Award
Published September 2, 2025
Thoughtful innovation in paratransit isn’t just about deploying new tools, it’s about purposefully transforming operations. By partnering with Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), AlphaRoute deployed its Non-Dedicated Service Provide (NDSP) Optimization tool to redefine routing and scheduling. This innovative tool is boosting efficiency, cutting costs, and led to our recognition as one of METRO Magazine’s 2025 Innovative Solutions Award winners. Now in its 11th year, the Innovative Solutions Awards recognize bus and rail operations and their supplier partners for initiatives that have led to cost savings, increased efficiency, streamlined operations, enhanced safety, improved customer satisfaction, and higher ridership, among other benefits.
Solving Paratransit’s Toughest Challenges
Paratransit systems face substantial challenges, including unpredictable trip demand, budget constraints, and per-trip costs significantly exceeding those of other transportation modes. Traditional routing methods struggle to adapt. MBTA needed a smarter approach—to do more with less, while preserving, or even improving, service quality.
Utilizing NDSP Optimization: Moving Beyond Manual Outsourcing
In recent years, many paratransit software companies have highlighted the importance of integrating with Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), such as Uber, Lyft, and taxi providers, known in the industry as Non-Dedicated Service Providers (NDSPs). This integration aims to improve efficiency and help address driver shortages by allowing dispatchers to seamlessly send eligible trips to TNC platforms. While this capability clearly adds value for system integration and data integrity, it raises key operational questions: How do agencies actually gain efficiency from the process? Which trips should be shifted daily? And what additional opportunities might be missed without a smarter strategy?
The answer lies in NDSP Optimization. Rather than relying on schedulers and dispatchers to manually decide which trips to outsource (a time-consuming and often inefficient approach), AlphaRoute’s advanced algorithms can evaluate all eligible trips each day and strategically shift the right ones. This ensures maximum system-wide performance, something outdated methods like simple trip filtering or outsourcing “left-over” rides from scheduling batches fail to achieve. By leveraging optimization instead of manual decision-making, transit agencies can intelligently shift trips to NDSPs and realize efficiency at scale.
Partnering for Impact with MBTA
Deployment: AlphaRoute integrated their NDSP Optimization tool into MBTA’s paratransit operations over a phased rollout—from pilot to full scale. The tool precisely optimizes routes by processing complex daily data, which includes service agreements, customer eligibility, and capacity limits.
Results: The program achieved measurable gains including significant reductions in cost, better on-time performance, greater operational agility, and increased customer satisfaction. In 2024, after over 1.24 million trips were optimized, the solution achieved very low error rates and very high system availability (99.83% of all trips inputted into the system were optimized). This resulted in an average savings of $22.88 per trip and 4-5 hours of work each day. MBTA’s improved performance with the help of AlphaRoute earned the 2025 Innovative Solutions Award.
AlphaRoute’s Path Forward
AlphaRoute continues refining its NDSP Optimization tool, while also maintaining a relentless drive to improve its other software products. Through iterative development, rigorous testing, and user feedback, AlphaRoute innovates to deliver powerful, efficient, and superior solutions. Some of their other transit products include:
- Driver Shift Optimization: For data-driven run cut designs
- AlphieAI: Your AI-powered transit analytics assistant
- Microtransit Planner API: Strategic fleet and driver shift design
All of these software solutions operate independently or integrate seamlessly with existing transportation management systems. The goal? To better serve the people who rely on transit every day and ultimately improve their quality of life.
Achieving award-winning efficiency isn't accidental—it stems from intentional design, data-driven decisions, and relentless focus on rider experience. The MBTA–AlphaRoute success is a testament to innovation grounded in real-world impact.
AlphaRoute is committed to continuing this journey, advancing paratransit solutions that serve riders, agencies, and the communities that depend on them, ensuring that innovation translates into meaningful outcomes.
About AlphaRoute:
AlphaRoute is a cutting-edge routing and fleet management software solution designed to optimize school transportation and transit efficiency while simultaneously reducing costs. By leveraging advanced MIT-created algorithms and data-driven insights, AlphaRoute enables streamlined operations, improved routing, and enhanced service reliability. With a commitment to innovation and practical solutions, and unmatched customer support, AlphaRoute empowers transportation operations to achieve smarter, more cost-effective strategies. Learn more at AlphaRoute.com.
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.
Using ESSER Funding Before it Expires to Enhance Transportation Operations
The clock is ticking for school districts across the country to utilize the remaining federal funds allocated as part of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Act (ESSER). With the ESSER III program concluding on September 30, 2024, school districts must take the time to strategically plan how they will utilize their remaining funds before they run out. Many districts are looking to enhance their transportation operations with software upgrades or technical support, which is AlphaRoute’s specialty. By using MIT-designed algorithms to convert routing plans into math problems, AlphaRoute eliminates driver shortages and improves service, so the focus can remain on the most important piece of the puzzle: student success. Here’s how taking a keen look at your district’s transportation system can be the answer to where your remaining ESSER funding should be spent. Address the Bus Driver Shortage The school bus driver shortage isn’t going to get any easier. Transportation teams are well aware that the shortage is something that brewed behind the scenes for years until coming to a breaking point during the pandemic. But, the good news is that when the Department of Education released guidance on ESSER funds in 2021, they explained that school districts could use the coronavirus relief packages to address the ongoing bus driver shortage. Pulled from the American Rescue Plan (ARP), the plan determined that the money was set to “help safely reopen and sustain the safe operation of schools and address the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the Nation’s students.” Local educational agencies are now permitted to use ESSER funding for salary increases for current bus drivers, for other operational expenses related to recruiting and retention… and for technological solutions to the current driver shortage. The Transportation Answer Several school districts used their ESSER money to enhance their transportation needs. For example, Michigan’s Coldwater Community Schools upgraded their bus fleet and purchased new classroom technology including 406 desktop computers, 138 document cameras and 135 projectors. The Williamsfield, Illinois school district spent about 85% of their ESSER III funding on pupil transportation services, combining that with funds from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus rebate program to replace seven diesel buses with electric ones that allowed students to be more spaced out on buses and to spend a shorter time on bus trips, K12 Dive reported. The Noblesville Schools in Indiana used their ESSER funding to provide bonuses for all staff, including transportation staff, and to pay transportation employees who worked overtime while students stayed late after school or attended remedial remediation work to alleviate pandemic learning loss. While the potential usage for ESSER funding is diverse, it’s quite obvious that transportation can use the most financial investment. The Time to Act is Now Some school systems set ESSER funding aside that they ended up not using. Unfortunately, neglecting to use ESSER funding could have severe implications for students. As stated by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, these could include potential teacher layoffs, school closures, and the loss of student programming. While the impact could hit anywhere, experts say low-income districts would be hit the hardest. If you’re considering how to use your ESSER funding before time runs out, it’s imperative to take a look at your district’s transportation system. Consider the specialized and efficient route planning AlphaRoute provides. Everything we do is driven by sophisticated mathematical and machine learning-based methodologies used to design efficient school bus routes that are safe, feasible, reliable, and cost-effective. AlphaRoute’s ability to exceed expectations and reduce bus counts by as much as 30 percent is a solid demonstration of how game-changing technology can transform bus routing. Putting your ESSER funding toward that goal is a wise investment! After all, an investment that helps to wipe out one of the toughest challenges facing districts today – the driver shortage – AND helps to transform the student experience is one that pays off for districts for many years to come. Request a free demo of AlphaRoute today to explore how your school district can use its ESSER funding to reduce driver shortages and improve student outcomes by optimizing the transportation system. Watch a quick video here.
Co-Creating Software with One of the Biggest Districts in the U.S.
Addressing bus driver shortages is possibly the hardest thing that school districts have to deal with. AlphaRoute has proven adept at eliminating shortages, though, and does much more as well through its innovative approach to bus route optimization. True, holistic optimization is hard — that’s why other vendors struggle to do it — but AlphaRoute’s MIT-based technology makes it look easy.
So what does a company do when it’s already tackled the hard stuff? It turns to something easier: Software development! Eric Ries, a popular podcast host, entrepreneur, business consultant and author of The Lean Startup, once said that the only limitation to software is your imagination. AlphaRoute applies this credo to its work everyday, developing customized software solutions for school districts, helping them to transport students safely, reliably, and efficiently. AlphaRoute makes that look easy, too, and even better: It makes software that’s easy to use!
Here’s a look at how AlphaRoute helped to modernize the transportation system used by one of the largest school systems in the country.
Co-Creating a Parent Portal
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) in North Carolina is the 17th largest district in the United States. With more than 140,000 students and about 113,000 students assigned to transportation, the school district was looking for a high-quality parent portal that would allow families to monitor their children’s route information and submit transportation-related requests. CMS Transportation began talking to AlphaRoute in the spring of 2023 about its need to replace its parent portal due to a lack of support from the vendor.
“As a district, we relied on school staff to let families know when their requests were complete, and often no notification was provided to families due to daily demands at the school,” said Kevin Devore, CMS’ Director of Routing, Logistics, and Systems. They needed a system that parents could use to easily request transportation or an alternate stop location if the one they had wasn’t sufficient for their children. AlphaRoute understood their difficulties and knew that customized software was the solution.
On spec, AlphaRoute built the software that CMS needed in order to function successfully. Both parties collaborated on the design of the system, a testament to how vendors and clients should work together, and AlphaPortal was born. AlphaRoute’s parent portal, the application incorporates several complex features, including easy access to student routing information and all the parent requests CMS was looking for.
AlphaRoute knew that alone would not be enough to give CMS what it needed, so it added an integrated ecosystem around the portal. CMS ended up with a suite of modules tailor-made to them, including:
- AlphaPlan: AlphaRoute’s routing software, which CMS could easily use to manage diverse requests submitted by parents and family members
- AlphaCom: A communication system that enables automated messages to be sent to families when their requests are processed, in addition to many other communication and messaging features
- AlphaCore: An administrative module that allows the school system to add new users, edit permissions, control application settings, and perform other administrative tasks
- AlphaSchool: A school staff module, which gives CMS school staff easy access to their students’ routing info and any current student requests, along with the ability to make requests themselves.
These systems turned out to be the answer the school system needed in order to thrive.
A Customized Solution
After coming together in the spring of 2023, the system was developed by the fall, and launched in December. Able to withstand well over 100,000 users at one time, AlphaRoute’s software transformed CMS’ operations.
“The final product saw over 8,000 requests in the first 3 months it was available,” said Devore of CMS. The result is that families are better notified of the status of their requests and schools no longer have to spend time on bus information and can stay focused on teaching and learning!
“Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Transportation wants to thank the AlphaRoute team for building what we needed in our department,” Devore shared. “We were impressed with AlphaRoute’s ability to implement internal processes in their software which helped reduce the learning curve and made the transition to their applications so seamless!”
AlphaRoute understands that utilizing nontraditional ways of thinking is an essential component of solving problems. As seen in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School system, game-changing technology can serve as a gateway to changing the lives of students.
To request a demo of AlphaRoute, click here.
An AlphaRoute Success Story: How Manatee County Trimmed their Route Count by 12%
Published on : December 1, 2023
More than 50% of U.S. schoolchildren rely on half a million yellow school buses to travel to and from school every day. This percentage has increased in recent years as more and more districts have expanded school choice. The problem is that very few of these districts seem to have enough drivers to transport the students anymore. This was the case for one Florida county who recently worked with AlphaRoute and discovered, as other districts have, that AlphaRoute’s technology can ease their pain.
The Transportation Problem
The School District of Manatee County (SDMC) was struggling. The district serves more than 52,000 students spread across more than 700 square miles south of Tampa Bay, and not long ago it had more than 150 bus drivers to bring these students to school. As of the 2021-22 school year, they had to cut their route count to 129 because of a driver shortage that only got worse as the year progressed. Fast forward to 2022-2023, and they had to cut it further, down to 106 routes. Their team worked extremely hard to make these reductions, but the resulting service was poor, with double runs in many places and drastically late arrivals both morning and afternoon. They simply couldn’t do any better in light of a driver pool which kept evaporating in front of them. Their story is the same for many good transportation teams across North America.
The AlphaRoute Solution
AlphaRoute began working with Manatee County in late 2022, using its MIT-designed algorithms to optimize district routing solutions. "We partnered with AlphaRoute to assist with route reductions to improve efficiency and address the current shortage of school bus drivers,” said Jamie Warrington, SMDC’s Director of Transportation and Vehicle Maintenance.
AlphaRoute produced more than a half-dozen unique routing solutions for Manatee County, all aligning with their policies and overall objectives. They landed on a routing solution early last summer which called for 94 buses – a 12-bus reduction – and led to more predictable and reliable service for students and families. As the AlphaRoute team added additional levels of support throughout the engagement, the School District of Manatee County was given the tools to mitigate the effects of the driver shortage.
A Transportation Triumph
AlphaRoute’s 12% bus reduction proved to be a game-changer for Manatee County, Warrington recently shared. “From the beginning, they were transparent as to their ability, set the expectations, and then executed those expectations without fail,” he noted, adding that the AlphaRoute team went beyond the scope of work they were contracted for. “Their work allowed us to see where we needed to improve our own routing practices. We are so thankful for their assistance with this project, and their post project support!" Manatee County’s success story is a testament to AlphaRoute’s optimized district routing solutions. By trimming their route count by 12%, Manatee County secured a lasting solution to a persistent problem.
If you’re interested in learning more about how AlphaRoute can improve transportation for your students, request a free demo today.
Myth-Busting the Driver Shortage
School systems across the globe are navigating the complex and political realities of driver shortages, leaving transportation directors and other leaders searching for remedies.
There are a few pervasive myths regarding the driver shortage issue that we’d like to dispel here:
MYTH #1: The shortage is temporary; driver numbers will go up again.
TRUTH: Transportation teams know that the shortage has been growing in severity in recent years and is only going to get worse.
MYTH #2: School districts should “hire” their way out of their driver shortage by increasing pay and focusing more on recruitment.
TRUTH: Increased pay and sign-on bonuses help to attract more drivers, but these gains are frequently offset by the number of drivers leaving the job, proving that districts cannot hire their way out of this problem. A Florida school district representative once described recruiting programs as “CDL mills,” since many new hires leave for higher-paying jobs once they have their commercial drivers licenses. Some school systems pay drivers more than $25 per hour and still are short by dozens of drivers. Districts absolutely should consider increasing pay for drivers, but by pivoting the focus from driver recruitment to bus route optimization, school systems can confront the shortage head-on with a strategy that’s significantly more sustainable.
MYTH #3: Our school bus routes are already as efficient as possible.
TRUTH: This is one of the most common myths out there, and districts’ refusal to think differently only exacerbates the driver shortage. Transportation teams think their bus routes are already efficient because they spend hours going over each one and looking for ways to consolidate. Their efforts are well-intentioned but directed in the wrong place. MIT research proved that districts who focus on individual runs and on sets of runs at individual schools are inherently building an inefficient system. Yes, the individual runs matter – of course they do! – but they have to work together to create an efficient system, and it’s the system as a whole that matters most. AlphaRoute loves working with districts who thought they already had an optimal system, only to see our technology reduce their bus count by more than 10%!
MYTH #4: There is no technology advanced enough to solve this issue.
TRUTH: There is one: By using MIT-designed algorithms to convert routing plans into math problems, AlphaRoute optimizes district routing solutions, lowering bus counts and improving service while also bringing real-world transportation department experience to the mix as well.
- AlphaRoute’s system typically reduces bus counts by 10% to 30%. This allows school districts to alleviate their driver shortage and improve service so the most important pieces of the puzzle remain in focus: the students.
- Using the technology behind AlphaRoute, Boston Public Schools was able to consolidate 50 routes, saving nearly $5 million from its budget.
- AlphaRoute partnered with Columbus, Ohio to cut 150 bus routes in less than 4 weeks, without changing any bell times, moving any student bus stops, or removing any children from service. The bus count dropped from 704 to 558.
- AlphaRoute worked with the School District of Manatee County (FL) and helped them trim their route count by 12%. The district’s transportation director recently credited AlphaRoute with going beyond their scope of work and showing his team where they could improve their routing practices.
- From larger districts who have cut 100 bus routes to smaller ones who learned how to utilize a specialized plan that works best for them, AlphaRoute’s technology can bring efficiency and savings to any size school district.
The driver shortage isn’t a temporary problem. Finding a lasting solution to a persistent problem requires thinking differently. AlphaRoute’s ability to outperform the status quo by as much as 30 percent is proof that this is the kind of new thinking that school systems need and is a testament to our revolutionary technology and our unique approach to bus routing.
If you’re interested in exploring how your school district can eliminate your driver shortage and improve transportation service to students, then request a free demo of AlphaRoute.
