ITS for Transit

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Public transit and paratransit agencies aim to serve the public by providing mobility to individuals within their service area. This mobility is critical for facilitating access to employment, recreation, health care, shopping, and other resources. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) deployments are facilitating gains in how transit agencies provide mobility to customers.

HOW IT WORKS

Recent significant growth has been noted for several ITS technologies applied to transit applications, such as automatic vehicle location (AVL), computer aided dispatch and scheduling, automatic passenger counters (APCs), and agency-branded or third-party mobile apps with an array of features to support customer use of agency services.

BENEFITS

Around the country, transit systems feature ITS technologies that increase reliability as well as reduce wait times, delays, and total travel time.

• In West Virginia, trips made with a multimodal real-time transit information application indicated a 63 percent average reduction in bus stop wait time (2022-B01646).
• In Pennsylvania, the Port Authority of Allegheny County used APCs and AVL systems to improve bus schedule adherence by 20 percent (2020-B01442).
• In California, an integrated dynamic transit operation system was able to decrease connecting passengers’ average wait time by 24 to 31 minutes for bus-to-bus connections (2021-B01613).