Transit Scheduling Data Integration: Paratransit Operations Review and Analysis

The ability of transit service providers in small urban areas and rural communities to meet increasing demands generated by welfare-to-work customers and other social agencies depends on their ability to make best use of available resources through efficient scheduling and service delivery. Scheduling trips and dispatching vehicles are critical functions in operating any transit system. Scheduling, in general public and special paratransit systems, refers to the matching of vehicles and trip requests. Collecting and managing rapidly changing data is essential for efficiency and effectiveness of these functions, as are the decisions involved in vehicle assignment and routing. Effective use of modern information technology is the key issue here. In these systems, data management is complicated by the fact that clients of several external agencies contribute to system demand. These include the Texas Department of Health (TDH), workforce boards, and others. For example, regional TDH offices perform client eligibility screening for Medicare recipients, and authorize trips for medical purposes. TDH generally provides these trip schedules by phone or fax to the transit system the day before the required service. Using manual scheduling processes, these Medicare trips may be allocated inefficiently to the available fleet, limiting the system's ability to respond to other demands for service. The primary goal of this study is to investigate the technical problems associated with integrating data from several external agencies, and to recommend (1) an existing commercially available dispatching and scheduling system that can be used by all Texas paratransit systems and (2) process improvements for the transit agencies and their external partners which will enable them to realize the full benefits of the new system.