Antelope Valley Transit Authority Answers Questions in Fifteen Minutes Flat
The Antelope Valley Transit Authority’s fleet of 75 buses serves over 450,000 residents in Lancaster, Palmdale, and the unincorporated portions of northern Los Angeles County, with over 1,200 square miles connecting the Antelope Valley to the rest of Los Angeles and Kern counties. It recently adjusted its processes for service changes: Now, AVTA makes modifications to schedules (if needed) every six months coinciding with the operators shake-up.
Remix has recently been my go-to tool for quickly calculating cost, vehicle requirements and demographic details — easily allowing me to compare existing service with proposed new service or rerouting of existing service
With the latest comprehensive operational analysis, AVTA began to incorporate ongoing minimal service tweaks in January, with major modifications being conducted in June. “We cover approximately 1,200 square miles of service area, with the population densities focused within the cities of Lancaster, Palmdale and unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. Doing more with less is key in service development and scheduling,” says senior planning officer Dietter Aragon. “Remix has recently been my go-to tool for quickly calculating cost, vehicle requirements and demographic details — easily allowing me to compare existing service with proposed new service or rerouting of existing service.”
The June changes will affect eight current lines of its local service; AVTA is combining some and restructuring their names, as well as shifting around weekend service and adding new services to better serve the community. Currently, Saturdays and Sundays follow the same schedule, but Sunday ridership is far lower. The June changes will boost Saturday service and possibly institute holiday service.
Dietter has been pleased with Remix’s ability to quickly calculate cost, miles, hours and additional demographic views, along with the number of buses AVTA will need to execute its service changes. He frequently uses the links and export tools Remix provides to present data to AVTA’s executive team for review.
He’s hoping that the same sort of clear communication will ease the process of explaining to riders why AVTA will be changing service that’s familiar to them, or making changes that don’t seem immediately beneficial. “We’re going to be taking Remix to the public, so when we do our outreach, we’ll be able to show this live to the public and talk about each route one by one. The beauty about Remix is that you can show how effective or ineffective a service is or can be, simply by turning on a few layers.”
Dietter plans to take his laptop to all the public meetings and project a Remix map on-screen, so that he can talk about specific changes. “I think this sends a stronger message than a couple PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint is great, but, we sometimes get comments like, ‘How about having loop around there? Or what if you extend the service by 30 minutes?’ Well, now we can show our customers in real time and they can see how that impacts cost.”
Additionally, Remix has amped up Dietter’s day-to-day workflow. Dietter tells us about the day that his executive director asked him to figure out how much a certain route scenario would cost. “I think I was on a conference call during that time too, but it literally took me less than fifteen minutes to give him a fairly concise report. I received an email back that read ‘Wow, that was fast’. Dietter estimates that assembling information from Google Earth, GIS, and Excel for the same kind of request would of taken at least an hour.
With Remix, we’ll be able to use this tool to show the public, our Technical Advisory Committee and our Board Members how these changes will benefit their community.
In February, Dietter presented an overview of his proposed service changes to AVTA’s Board of Directors. He’ll take them to the public next, and in March and April, he’ll begin scheduling the routes. After delivering final recommendations to the board at the end of April, everything should be said and done by May for a go-live In June. “There’s definitely going to be a lot of great changes for the community. We have a great team here,” Dietter says. “With Remix, we’ll be able to use this tool to show the public, our Technical Advisory Committee and our Board Members how these changes will benefit their community.”
