Introducing Remix Scheduling: the first scheduling product that lets you explore every option

Since we started Remix three years ago, our product development philosophy has centered around understanding the problems transit agencies face. We’ve been lucky to partner with over 225 agencies across 10 countries, and build a global community that actively shapes what we design everyday.

We created Remix Planning so agencies could envision and define their transit plans. Since then, the biggest question we’ve gotten is this:

Once the plan is approved, how do I actually take that plan and implement it? How do I launch new service on the street for my riders?

Today, we’re excited to answer that question and announce the launch of our next product, Remix Scheduling — the first scheduling product designed to let you explore every option.

Aligning Remix’s product roadmap to the transit agency process.

Three initial insights 💡

Over the last few years, we’ve been doing research and development with agencies on their scheduling processes, and here’s what we learned:

1. It’s time-consuming. We saw agencies spending 2–3 months per bid developing new schedules. We’ve heard that some places will actively not change their service, even if they’re suffering from critical issues like poor on-time-performance — simply because there’s not enough staff time to redo the schedule. In the end, this costs agencies both financially and in the quality of service for riders.
2. It’s a difficult discipline to learn. It can take years to fully understand the nuts and bolts of scheduling (blocking, runcutting, rostering, etc.). Pair that with steep learning curves for existing tools, and you’ll understand why people say things like “there’s a scheduler shortage across the industry” and “it takes 7 years to become a scheduler.”
3. It’s a black box. Without a clear understanding of what inputs are needed for a good schedule to come out, drivers, union leads, planners, executives, and other departments don’t know which scenarios are truly feasible until it’s too late. How often has an aspirational 15-minute frequency been watered down to 20 or 25 minutes, due to unforeseen resource constraints?

Three guiding principles ✨

With those in mind, we built Remix Scheduling based on the critical needs identified by agencies:

1. ⚡️ Try scenarios fast — explore every option in minutes, not hours.
2. 👁 Show the impact — scheduling is all about difficult operational tradeoffs, so immediately visualize how those affect costs and people.
3. 🔎 Make it easy to understand — with intuitive design and a low barrier to entry, it should be easy to get input early on, when it matters most.

In short, you should never settle for an option because you don’t have time to find a better one. Here’s a two-minute peek:

What’s inside

Our engineering team spent two years developing blocking, runcutting, and rostering algorithms based on state-of-the-art optimization techniques. We then surrounded them in an easy-to-use interface that gives your team full control over the details of their schedules. A few things we’re most excited by:

Seamless integration with Remix Planning — Take routes and timetables directly from the planners and immediately build blockings, runcuts, and rosters on top. This ensures that scheduling can easily carry the planning vision through.

Interactive blocking — Assign trips to vehicles with a drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy (and kinda fun) to spot and correct inefficiencies.

Remix Runcut Explorer — Instead of repetitively adjusting parameters and waiting for a new runcut, get 60 options all at once. Then evaluate them instantaneously to find the one that balances the needs of your drivers with your budget.

With the technical power of Remix Scheduling alongside Remix Planning, all of your transit ideas can live in one place, end-to-end, from the big vision all the way down to detailed implementation.

Behind the scenes: sketching and co-creating the product with partner agencies. Here’s a whiteboard session we did with The Bus in Merced, CA (on the left) that led to the design of Remix’s visual runcut interface (on the right).

Results so far

Of course, new technology is meaningless unless it achieves impact. Together with our agencies, we’ve seen some exciting results already:

• Connect Transit in Bloomington-Normal, IL saved $294,000 annually by successfully trying out interlining for the first time.
• GLTC in Lynchburg, VA eliminated all of their major split shifts, leading to 100% driver retention after their latest bid.
• AVTA in Lancaster, CA is preparing to launch the world’s first all-electric fleet this year, using Remix to schedule the entire thing.

None of this would have been possible without two crucial parts: first, the 15 agencies who participated in our Early Customer Program and believed in the value of this work — we can’t thank you enough. And second, the writers of TRB’S Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Report 135 — you taught our team the fundamentals of transit scheduling (we were the ones that bought out your entire book supply last year).

We can’t wait to see more transit agencies expand access in their communities and make their plans real.

Want to learn more about Remix Scheduling? Feel free to reach out here.

Are you a Remix Planning customer interested in exploring Remix Scheduling as a new product? Contact your Customer Success Manager and we’ll setup a chat with our Growth team.

Want to be a part of the team that makes it happen? We’re hiring for a new Scheduling Implementation Manager!