Project Balance has a deep understanding of the challenges and complexities of collecting, harmonizing, and displaying data for the transportation industry. There are many uncontrollable factors that make managing moving vehicles challenging, such as route detours, special events, or changing weather. The ever-changing landscape in which buses, trains, vans/cars, and bikes operate makes data collection and analysis difficult to perform. Transport agencies deal with great volumes of data coming from vehicle traffic sensors, GPS devices, and passenger sensors, all coming from devices built and managed by different third-party companies, combined with varying levels of data quality, accuracy, systems, and formats. The most important key performance indicators, such as on-time performance, ridership, and vehicle breakdown frequency, can be difficult to report without a lot of manual data intervention.
Project Balance has expertise in pulling data via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) or automating a data download and load process into staging tables, at which time the data is cleaned, transformed, and moved into a data warehouse. We have experience pulling data from OrbCAD, Swiftly, Trapeze, UTA, and Via, and combining these data with financials such as Dynamics 365. We recommend using a data management tool to assist with displaying and managing data exceptions and managing master/reference data, such as bus route stops and names. Exceptions such as counting riders for unscheduled trips and special events that fall outside a predefined schedule can cause issues and may require manual updating before allowing the records to move into the data warehouse.
Route names and stops may differ across different data collection platforms, requiring standardization. These kinds of manual activities can be done through a centralized and auditable management application, which is vital for data integration and interoperability. A transportation data warehouse combines “facts” such as distance, time, and cost values with dimensions like routes, schedules, vehicle types, and garage information. By putting the data into a multi-dimensional database, users can quickly verify the performance across the different transportation services and make any adjustments needed for optimal performance.
Project Balance partnered with California Creative Solutions (2022-2024) to build an organization-wide data warehouse for Capital Metro, the transportation agency for the City of Austin and neighboring suburbs…
Project Balance has a deep understanding of the challenges and complexities of collecting, harmonizing, and displaying data for the transportation industry. There are many uncontrollable factors that make managing moving vehicles challenging, such as route detours, special events, or changing weather. The ever-changing landscape in which buses, trains, vans/cars, and bikes operate makes data collection and analysis difficult to perform. Transport agencies deal with great volumes of data coming from vehicle traffic sensors, GPS devices, and passenger sensors, all coming from devices built and managed by different third-party companies, combined with varying levels of data quality, accuracy, systems, and formats. The most important key performance indicators, such as on-time performance, ridership, and vehicle breakdown frequency, can be difficult to report without a lot of manual data intervention.