You work hard to make sure your daily schedule is planned as efficiently as possible ahead of time. However, during a real day of service, things constantly change — for better and for worse. Surprise road closures, traffic jams, or a single operator running behind can cause lateness that affects the rest of the schedule. At the same time, ride cancellations can create valuable opportunities to aggregate riders more efficiently or avoid lateness. But it’s unrealistic to expect even the most experienced dispatcher to predict these issues or spot the opportunities in real-time, even when doing so can unlock on-time performance and efficiency improvements for your service.
Purpose-built software predicts — and prevents — lateness while improving efficiency, to help you meet your most critical goals.
That’s where Auto Reassign comes in. It simultaneously scans your schedule to identify opportunities to make it more efficient or provide a better rider experience. Auto Reassign keeps an eye on every ride, shift, and vehicle to keep the schedule running on time. It looks at live road conditions, long detours, rides that are taking more or less time than planned to complete, and cancellations or no-shows. Then, it automatically predicts rides that are at risk of being late and proactively reassigns them to help avoid lateness.
Auto Reassign also takes advantage of unexpected opportunities — like a ride cancelation — to improve the daily plan, giving your dispatchers time back to focus on providing high quality rider support. Auto Reassign isn't one-size-fits-all. Via works with you to understand your goals to ensure it thoughtfully takes them into account when improving your service. An agency struggling with a major operator shortage may prefer for Auto Reassign to focus reassignments on maximizing efficiency. Meanwhile, an agency whose board is chiefly focused on providing a strong rider experience may want Auto Reassign to prioritize minimizing time riders spend on board a vehicle. Whatever your goals are, Auto Reassign is a powerful asset to helping you achieve them.
Auto Reassign In Action.
Let’s take an example:
- Auto-Reassign predicts that Ride C is scheduled to be completed a little bit late — outside of the riders’ communicated window. Auto Reassign begins scanning the Ride Plan to find a more punctual assignment, but availability is limited.
- When Rider A cancels their ride because they woke up with a cold, Auto Reassign immediately notices the available space on Shift 1.
- Auto Reassign knows that Ride B is going in the same direction as the other rides in Shift 1, so it reassigns it to that shift. By reassigning the ride, it didn’t just improve utilization in Shift 1, it also gave Shift 2 the extra time to pick up Ride C earlier, ensuring an on-time ride.
In practice, our partners have seen Auto Reassign increase the number of rides that are on-time, reduce miles traveled, and decrease the amount of time added to any given ride due to detours by providing more optimized ride assignments.
In one major urban ADA paratransit service, in a single week 14% of on-time rides (~500 rides) were “saved” from being late by Auto-reassign. Auto Reassign also reduced vehicle detours by almost 1000 miles, which amounts to roughly $40,000 in annual savings.
Automatically improves your schedule and informs riders, drivers, and staff, while giving you the right degree of control.
In all services, but particularly when serving seniors or riders with disabilities, it’s critical that riders, drivers, and dispatchers know what to expect. That’s why any changes made by Auto Reassign are relayed automatically to affected parties to ensure everyone is in the loop — dispatchers see rides move between vehicles in the Ride Plan, drivers see their task lists update in real time, and riders receive direct communications about any changes to their ride.
We also recognize that there will sometimes be some sensitive rides you prefer Auto Reassign doesn’t change. Maybe Mrs. Smith always needs to ride with Driver Sarah, or you always want Mr. Ortiz to get picked up exactly at 2pm. That’s why we also give you the power to 'Protect Rides', which allows you to identify specific rides that should not be touched by Auto Reassign. This allows you to provide consistency for riders who need it the most. At a time when agencies are being called to do more with existing resources, and rider expectations for service quality rise, it’s even more critical that agencies are empowered to provide high quality service, as efficiently as possible. Auto Reassign is a powerful tool, it's your safety net and partner in running a more timely and efficient service.
This article is part of a series introducing ViaAlgo, the algorithm that powers Auto Reassign’s capabilities and the brain behind Via’s 600+ worldwide deployments. Explore other ways that ViaAlgo can help save money through increased efficiency in our ViaAlgo Features Series.
Interested in learning more? Find time to talk with our team.
