Metrolinx has been using Transify in support of their GO Bus service, an express bus network that serves regional destinations across the Toronto area from Niagara Falls and Waterloo to Barrie and Peterborough.
While they’ve been working on getting their KPIs into PowerBI, which is used organization-wide for reporting, transit planners like Anthony Smith, a senior planner at Metrolinx, have been using Transify to take a closer look at the ridership of each of their routes using APC data.
With ridership tumbling at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Transify proved useful when they were able to see how ridership patterns changed too, with demand to post-secondary schools and shopping centres falling the fastest. As did identifying which stops along routes were the most impacted, like the Yorkdale Bus Terminal, which is adjacent to a major shopping destination.
In fact, Transify was featured in Anthony’s presentation at TransitData 2020, a conference at the University of Toronto that brought together transportation academics and professionals from all over the world to discuss the latest innovations in the world of fixed-route transit technology.
We’ve also included a recording of the presentation below, but among the many concluding remarks here's the one we found to be the most relevant given today's rapidly changing transit usage:
“You need to dive deeply into those rich, local level data to understand the patterns of travel” - Anthony Smith, Senior Planner at Metrolinx.