Get More from Your Timetables: Introducing Trip-Based Costing

We’ve updated our costing methodology to improve the costs presented in Remix.

Introducing Trip-Based Costing

When we launched Timetables last month, we opened up the possibility of planning your network down to the minute. Now, to take full advantage of Timetables, we’re happy to announce that the trips in your timetables now feed into your Remix cost calculations.

Here’s how it works.

Calculating Costs in Remix

Remix provides three options for estimating costs: by hours, vehicles, and distance. These are available within your Remix map settings.

Adjust the cost parameters for hours, buses, and miles in your Remix map settings.

With trip-based costing, once you’ve set up your flat per-hour, per-bus, or per-mile costs, Remix now multiplies these numbers by the corresponding trip-based estimates for revenue hours, vehicle estimates, and distance, respectively, to get your route cost estimates.

Cost by Hours

Cost by revenue hours = sum of the revenue service hours of the trips in your timetables, plus layover time, all multiplied by per-hour cost.

Remix calculates cost by hours by summing up the duration of all your trips plus layover, then multiplying it by your per-hour costs, where hours reflect the number of revenue hours per day your vehicles are open for business and carrying passengers.

To determine the number of revenue hours, Remix sums the runtime of all the trips within each line on your map.

In this timetable, each trip has a runtime of 20 minutes. There are three weekday trips for this route, which add up to a total of 60 minutes of revenue time.

Remix also gives you the option to add layover time to each trip in the form of a percentage of the trip time or a minimum number of minutes. The Remix default is 10%, but it is fully customizable.

In this example, keeping layover at 10% will add 6 minutes of total layover, giving you a grand total of 66 revenue minutes, or 1.1 revenue hours. Multiplying by your per-hour cost of $100 (from above) by 261 weekdays, you get a final cost estimate of $110 per day to run this route, or $28,710 per year.

Cost by Distance

Cost by distance = sum of the map distance of every trip in your timetable, including trips with different patterns and days of the week, all multiplied by per-mile (or per-km) cost.

Similar to revenue hours, Remix calculates the cost by distance by summing up the distance of all your trips, then multiplying this by your per-mile (or per-km) costs, where distance reflects the number of revenue miles (or kms) per day your vehicles are open for business and carrying passengers. In the example from before, one trip is 15.63 miles. Summing these three trip distances up, we get a total daily revenue distance of 46.89 miles.

This multiplied by the per-mile cost of $2.00 (from above) gets you a final cost estimate of $93.78 per day to run this route, or $24,477 per year.

Cost by Vehicle Counts

Cost by bus count = best-case number of buses during peak service, multiplied by per-bus cost.

Remix calculates cost by vehicle counts by determining the best-case number of buses needed to run the trips in your timetable, then multiplying this by your per-bus costs. Your best-case number of buses is your peak bus count, assuming that whenever a bus finishes a trip (plus layover), the bus is then available to make trips that begin from that time on. Let’s dig into the example.

By the time the first trip’s bus ends service at 6:20, it could conceivably go back into service for the 6:30 trip. Remix considers this the “best case,” and estimates that one bus can cover these two trips. Of course, the 6:15 trip can’t share a bus with the 6:00 or 6:30 trips because it runs concurrent with the others. It must use its own bus. Therefore, in this example, Remix estimates two buses to run this service.

Two buses multiplied by our per-bus cost of $5,000 (from above) gets a final cost estimate of $10,000 per year.

(Note that vehicle counts don’t account for deadhead. This means for trips that end far from another trip’s starting point, additional buses that may be required to cover the distance are not counted. Remix also only pairs up trips within the same route.)

Switching Between Trip- and Frequency-Based Estimates

Want to continue seeing your frequency-based estimates? We understand that you may need continuity in cost estimates for projects that are in flight. You can simply uncheck the trip-based costs box in your map settings, and you’re back to frequency-based calculations! Re-check the box to go toggle back!

You can toggle between frequency- and trip-based costing to wrap up projects in flight.

Timetables and trip-based costing are now available to all Remix customers. Want to learn more? Check out our FAQ and our demo video, or simply reach out to us at team@remix.com.