Understanding your data needs

Automatic vehicle location (AVL) and automatic passenger counting (APC) systems are becoming increasingly popular with transit systems, large and small. These data collection systems are hugely beneficial when considering customer service, planning and performance management, but how do you define your needs?

Technology for AVL and APC systems has improved immensely over the last decade — location accuracy is almost pinpoint and passenger count accuracy has improved significantly. It is becoming less important to be concerned about the technology aspects of the equipment, and much more important to understand your data needs, and develop specifications around those needs, rather than just to buy what is on offer. More important than choices in detection technology are the more detailed technical parameters such as polling rates, communications bandwidths, and the back-end software reporting tools and analysis functions.

For this, it is crucial to define what your system needs, who is going to use the data, what are they going to do with it, what data is really needed versus what is desirable, and what are the cost implications of different requirements. In some cases, a slightly different specification may make a little or a lot of difference in the overall cost.

BC Transit in British Columbia, Canada has embarked on a comprehensive process prior to procuring new AVL and APC technology. This has included existing data review, internal surveys and staff workshops to review data requirements and to understand the implications on the technical specifications. At the forefront of this effort, there has been a concern for having the proper tools to use the data generated by these systems.

BC Transit’s situation is complex, with the procurement addressing the needs of a medium-sized system (Victoria Regional) plus a host of smaller systems ranging from very small systems such as Fort. St. John to more regional systems such as Kelowna Transit, combined with different contractors and a range of different data needs and access requirements. For other systems, the question of interoperability with neighboring systems is crucial. Even in the more straightforward setting of a single system, the lessons are the same — thoroughly understand your data needs before embarking on the procurement process.

AVL and APC systems are large investments for many transit systems. Be sure to take the time necessary to define your functional requirements clearly, and to translate those into clear specifications to your vendors.

Written by Dennis Fletcher