Interlining for the First Time: The Decision that Saved Connect Transit $294k
For years, Connect Transit scheduled their transit service manually. This made it difficult to deal with deadhead and runcut inefficiencies in their system. With Remix, they’ve greatly reduced both — saving $294,000 annually as a result.
By the numbers:
- 9 routes interlined for the first time with Remix Scheduling’s visual blocking
- 3,000 service hours saved annually due to better deadhead outputs and runcut options
- $294,000 in total operational costs reduced per year
The Challenge
For years, the Connect Transit team scheduled their service manually. In a maze of complex formulas and spreadsheets, the team’s blocking and runcut options slowly came together into schedules that would sufficiently cover Connect’s service.
But with such a manual process, it wasn’t possible to change their blocking and runcuts before their bids were due. In fact, the schedule hadn’t changed for as long as anyone could remember, and the team knew they were leaving money on the table with their stagnant schedules.
For one, deadhead plagued their schedules. Interlining was too complex to model by hand, so they settled for schedules that sent buses back to the depot several times during the day.
Eliminating split shifts, too, was a challenge for the operations team. Due to peaky service in mornings and evenings, it was common for work shifts to be divided into two half-shifts at either end of the workday. Operators often had to stand by for long stretches of the afternoon, and the agency’s bottom line started feeling the effects.
The Solution
When Connect got the go-ahead to redesign their network in 2015, the team saw it as an opportunity to start afresh, following industry best practices to build a world-class transit network in their city.
With the help of Remix, they achieved what seemed impossible: they planned, approved, and implemented a COA in under a year, in one of the great transit success stories of 2016.
On the planning side, they designed routes on high-ridership corridors, quadrupling service frequency across most of the network while staying cost-neutral.
With Remix Scheduling, they were able to seamlessly shape these plans into an efficient schedule. Remix’s visual blocking interface made it simple to try out several options before settling on the right one for their network.
For the first time ever, Connect could address the inefficiency of their costly deadhead. “We interlined a total of nine routes,” says Martin Glaze, Transportation Operations Manager at Connect. “We interlined these during the planning process, before we even used Remix’s blocking. And Remix’s blocking made it easy to implement the plan.”
The Result
By using Remix Scheduling to introduce interlined routes and address runcut inefficiencies, Connect Transit is now saving 3,000 service hours annually, amounting to about $294,000 per year.
“We never had drivers do multiple routes with the same bus before,” Glaze says. “This would have been difficult to do by hand since we never had such complex routes, on top of adding peak service hours. And now we’re saving a whole lot of money because of it.”
To learn more about Remix Scheduling, read more here or contact us at team@remix.com.
