Our new features fall into three critical categories:
- Build integrated networks for seamless, efficient coverage
- Reimagine supply and fleet planning to maximize cost-effectiveness
- Incorporate AI and automations to save your team time
A quick note: we shared all of these features in action during our live Product Updates webinar. Missed it? Want to be the first to know next time? Sign up for our newsletter.
Via Intelligence: How we’re harnessing the power of AI for better public transit.
Before we get to the features, let’s talk Via Intelligence. This is our purpose-built AI that's woven into the Via platform, helping you make smarter decisions, boost efficiency, and delight riders. During the live session, we highlighted three ways that our tech is already allowing our partners to use AI to improve their networks:
- Planning: Our AI helps you predict accurate runtimes and rider reactions to route changes, giving you a crystal ball into ridership, costs, and system accessibility.
- Scheduling: Our scheduling engine creates the most efficient plan possible, continually re-optimizes it, and intervenes in potential problems before they happen. It also gets smarter over time.
- Manual Process Automation: AI handles the repetitive stuff—like scanning eligibility documents or answering simple call center questions—freeing up your team for complex, customer-facing work.
Theme 1: Build best in class integrated networks.
Best-in-class tools that empower our partners to design and operate services that seamlessly combine different transit modes for efficient coverage. Plus tools that allow those service to continually improve.
🚎 Introducing Via Service Design for more dynamic transit service.
Via Service Design is a new powerful, map-based tool that lets you design and manage your services directly from your screen. It brings your network to life—visualizing fixed routes networks, demand-responsive zones, and key data in one place—so you can make smarter and more impactful decisions. The highlights:
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- Rapid Self-Serve Service Changes: A storm, a special event, a new hospital? You can use Service Design to make and publish stop changes, zone shifts, or hour adjustments in seconds. Your network should be able to instantly respond to the real world — now it can.
- Intermodal Service Design: Easily design intermodal services that support your real riders’ needs—from filling first/last mile service gaps at the edges of your network to helping college students get home from campus after dark by setting up travel connections.
- Data-Driven Decisions: Visualize recent ridership data to see exactly where demand is concentrated, allowing for smarter zone expansion and evolution.
One early user in Denmark put it best when she said: “Service Design is an intuitive and efficient tool that makes it easy to adjust our service area. We can now update stops, service hours, and coverage areas in just a few minutes – and the real benefit is that our customers almost immediately experience that we can respond to their needs. This allows us to offer a more flexible and demand-driven public transport service.”
🚐🚍 The great intermodal update powers seamless experiences for all.
After nearly a decade of operating intermodal transit networks, we’ve learned a lot about what works. Our new and improved intermodal tech supercharges intermodal travel, allowing for smooth travel across fixed route, paratransit and microtransit.
- Improved Rider Messaging: Our AI-trained scheduling engine shows riders only the most relevant trips and explains why a given mode might be unavailable. Hello, higher trip acceptances! Goodbye, rider confusion.
- Enhanced Visibility & Reporting: Agents can see if a request was ineligible for demand response and the reason why. Our reporting now shows what modes a request was eligible for, if an intermodal proposal was booked, and which third-party trip broker (local taxi, TNC, etc.) served the trip.
- Expanded Connectivity: Set distance caps to encourage riders to use fixed-route for parts of their journey, and allow them to plan three-leg journeys right in the Via app. Together, we’re making every first and last mile trip possible.
Theme 2: Reimagine supply and fleet planning.
We're introducing new ways to incorporate mixed fleets, and easier tools to manage them.
📣New Via and Waymo partnership opens up new autonomous possibilities.
We've teamed up with Waymo to introduce fully autonomous vehicles directly into microtransit fleets. This provides an additional lever for keeping service reliable when driver demand is outpacing availability, all with a trusted partner.
📈Smart supply allocation tools boost full agency efficiency.
Our new multimodal scheduling tool lets you view and plan your fixed-route, paratransit, and microtransit shifts together in one interface, helping you spot efficiency gains across all modes.
🚕 Enhanced trip brokering tools seamlessly incorporate mixed fleets.
Easily manage overflow rides fulfilled by taxis or TNCs. You can assign, monitor, edit, and track external trips right in the Ride Plan, so dispatchers can focus on smooth service operations.
Theme 3: Supercharge your team with AI and automations.
New features cut the busy work, creating more time to focus on customer care and strategic work. We’ve focused on building automations that help Via partners save time across four mission-critical areas: eligibility management, call center, operator on-road experience, and dispatching.
✨ AI-assisted eligibility management.
- AI-Powered Application Scanning: Upload paper applications, and let AI do the data entry for you! According to early users at York Region Transit, incorporating AI into their eligibility process cut processing time by 50%!
- Automatic Letter Generation: Your eligibility managers can now generate pre-filled approval or denial letters with a few clicks, using your agency’s exact templates. Riders hear back faster, and your staff gets time back to focus on the people—not the paperwork.
- Suspensions Management: Easily identify and suspend riders who exceed late cancellation or no-show thresholds in just one click, reducing no-shows and cancellations, and ensuring fair access for all.
🎧 Improved call center efficiency and performance.
- AI call center agents: We're rolling out AI agents that can field incoming requests for ride statuses and cancellations, reducing call wait times, and freeing up staff time to focus on complex cases.
- Caregiver Web App: Our first-in-industry Caregiver App gives trusted caregivers real-time updates on their clients’ rides. Give everyone peace of mind, without the phone calls.
🚍 Smoother operator experiences for better service.
- New Driver App: The newly redesigned app gives drivers the right info, at the right time, all in a clean, intuitive interface. Drivers can provide personalized, first-rate service, and keep their attention where it matters most: safe driving.
- Automatic “first in, last out” scheduling: No more unloading and re-securing passengers! Our system remembers a vehicle’s configuration and automatically applies “Last In, First Out” scheduling for wheelchair riders, keeping service smooth and on time.
Seamless, streamlined dispatching.
- Ride Plan Map View: The new Ride Plan offers a built-in Map View that puts dispatchers as close to the road as possible, allowing them to make smart decisions throughout their shift.
- Assignment Rationale: No More Black Box Decisions: We're building Assignment Rationale to show you the reasoning and data behind scheduling engine recommendations, ensuring your team has the critical insight needed to trust the system or override it when operational realities require.
That’s a wrap!
These new features are live—or coming soon—and we can’t wait to see how you use them.
📩 Want to be the first to know about new features? Sign up for our newsletter to join the next Product Updates webinar.