Ireland’s National Transport Authority is making a tremendous expansion of its country-wide public transportation services, adding over 200 new local and county connections and over 60 new city connections as part of its Connecting Ireland Rural Mobility Plan. The NTA built their initial plan with Remix Transit in 2017. Seven years later a new Remix feature —Remix Calendar— is transforming how they make that plan a reality.
Let’s dive in.
1. Bringing 130+ routes into one view with Remix Calendar transforms visibility
The NTA is currently expanding service at the rate of nearly 1 new or enhanced route per week. Those routes are delivered by 15 different local agencies, each with local operators. All of these schedule changes must be communicated to riders across the country. When managing complexity across dozens of planning projects for different regions, their top priority was cutting down on inconsistent and inaccurate data funneled into the journey planner that riders rely on. Before Remix, other than riders reporting inaccuracies in the journey planner, the NTA had no easy way to check whether system information was entered correctly.
“Our primary goal was to get control of all of the information going into the journey planner. We had a hard time checking what was going into the planner for future services.” said Roy Harford from the NTA.
To maintain accurate journey planner information across the regions, all with their own schedules, holidays, and changes, the NTA had to first tackle their planning projects. Instead of keeping multiple Remix projects up to date (a challenging manual feat), they decided to implement Remix Calendar and bring their service plans into one project. This was the first time they had a view of their full service in one place, the first time they could see which routes were running on any given day.
How did they get there?
They grouped each route into service periods in Remix Calendar according to what dates they ran, allowing them to overlap multiple services throughout the year. By doing this, they built a master view to accurately manage all regional services for 130+ routes and see schedules and changes across all local operators at a national level.
“The new process, using Remix, has given Service Planning full visibility and control over what Local Link data is currently in the journey planner, and has made it a lot easier for us to make changes”, Roy explained.
2. Unified planning makes it easier to manage holidays, seasonal schedules, and temporary changes
A key use case of Remix Calendar for NTA was the ability to create different schedules for holidays and college periods across the country. Previously, these discrepancies had to be managed manually which led to mistakes resulting in inaccurate information being funneled to riders. Now in just a few clicks they create, update, and manage these schedules from their master project and view services on any given date.
“The calendar feature allows us to specify the exact dates which services are operating, and for the first time, we are now able to ensure that the correct schedules are showing for every route on public holidays, and that college-only or summer-only trips are showing for the correct dates across regions”.
3. Better data quality creates a better rider experience
From the master project, the NTA now accesses its Local Link data directly from a Remix GTFS URL, which can be consumed by its journey planning app. They were able to resolve hundreds of errors and start publishing accurate information that takes into account regional schedules, giving riders easy access to accurate trip information and confidence in new routes available to them, wherever they are in Ireland.
“Since switching over to this process, we have been able to fix hundreds of legacy errors and have significantly improved the quality of Local Link data in the journey planner” confirmed Roy.
4. Service planning and GTFS publishing from one place lets the NTA get changes to the public faster
At the rate of the NTA’s Local Link system expansion, it’s critical to quickly make sure changes are reflected accurately on a schedule. As they add new routes, update or manage stops, and catch errors, the team is now able to quickly make changes in their Remix plan and produce input data for their journey planner from the very same plan using a Remix GTFS URL (no extra step required!). This means changes can be made and provided to their journey planner promptly, and in turn, can be published to riders promptly.
“When a timetable change is due to take place, we can specify which date the old timetable should run up until, and which date the new timetable should commence from, saving us time spent in back and forth communication.”
Manually updated spreadsheets and emailed every change to 3rd party vendor for publishing.
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Dynamic, intuitive timetable interface where changes are published directly from Remix to GTFS in a click.
“A change that might have taken a few days, only takes a few seconds in Remix” Roy commented.
Consolidating plans into a single view with Remix Calendar fundamentally changes how agencies operate. New capabilities let you bring your initial ideas for improvements to full service operational plans. Login to your Remix account to try it out.
Want to learn more? Check out our blog on Remix Calendar.
