As we ring in 2025, we at Swiftly reflect on a year in which creativity and ingenuity from agencies around the world have helped drive ridership to approach and even exceed pre-pandemic levels.

Here at Swiftly, we pour our creativity and ingenuity into giving transit agencies the technology they need to deliver great service. Our approach is simple: listen to our 190+ transit agency partners, learn from their wisdom, find challenges that resonate across the industry, build products designed to make an impact, and share those solutions with all our agency partners.

We’d like to take you on a tour of what’s new in Swiftly’s transit data platform, with deep gratitude to our agency partners for sharing their insights and trusting Swiftly to help them make cities move efficiently.

Ensuring every rider is counted by adding ridership data to the Swiftly platform

In 2024, Swiftly acquired Hopthru, a leader in ridership data processing, National Transit Database certification, and ridership data analysis.

Swiftly now supports transit agencies in NTD reporting by cleaning and ensuring the accuracy of automatic passenger counting (APC) data with Hopthru Cleanse, as well as visualizing and analyzing ridership data to make ridership-informed planning decisions with Hopthru Analyze.

We featured how agencies like San Diego’s NCTD and the RTA of Central Maryland are reporting more accurate ridership numbers and grounding planning decisions in ridership-based data today in a recent webinar: Make every trip count—Reporting and analyzing ridership for 2025.

We’re excited to welcome the talented Hopthru team to Swiftly to expand their mission of bringing accurate and accessible ridership data and analytics to more transit agencies, especially as agencies prepare for 2025 NTD re-certification requirements.

At last, a modern navigation experience for bus operators

Being a bus operator is a challenging job, especially when starting out, learning a new route, or navigating detours. In response, agencies have asked us: “How can we help operators make the right turns?”

At many agencies, operators receive detours as a list of turns on a piece of paper—sometimes with handwritten notes or modifications. These instructions are not easy to parse when driving and are often subject to further changes as on-the-ground conditions change.

Swiftly’s Navigation in Onboard App provides a modern, smartphone-style navigation experience designed specifically for bus operators—with visual and audio turn-by-turn directions and up-to-the-minute detour information.

Truly usable navigation helps agencies to train operators more effectively, improve schedule adherence, and eliminate off-route vehicles, empowering agencies to deliver more reliable service.

Boston’s MBTA is using the technology today to provide a confidence-inspiring experience for operators, aid operators in navigating detours, and help onboard new operators.

“We’ve hired over 350 new operators in the last year. Though we train operators on all routes, it still can be a nerve-wracking experience to get out on the road for new operators,” said MBTA Executive Director of Bus Transportation Sean Mills. “This helps provide them with more confidence to learn more routes and be able to cover what would otherwise be dropped trips, when they have availability.”

At a time when ridership is returning to or exceeding peak levels and hiring and retaining operators is critical, providing them with the tools to do a great job is more important than ever.

“We are utilizing technology to give our dispatchers and operators the tools to make timely decisions and deliver improved and more reliable travel for our riders. Providing our front-line bus operators with turn-by-turn directions is another example of the investments we’re making in our workforce, building a more resilient and nimble transit system.”
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—Phillip Eng, General Manager and CEO, MBTA

Supplying operations and customer service with accurate information, faster

Seconds count when communicating with an operator or responding to a rider call. Swiftly’s goal is to help agencies proactively monitor and respond to system performance and disruptions, resolving issues before they snowball into bigger impacts on service.

To help keep service running smoothly, we added off-route tracking to Live Operations, enabling dispatchers to immediately identify a vehicle departing from its assigned route. We streamlined searching for things like vehicles, operators, blocks, and stops with a universal, typo-tolerant search box. And agency staff can more easily select the routes that matter with route groups.

The new block schedule view shows a vehicle’s upcoming trips, stops, and ETAs—including detours and other adjustments—to help staff quickly understand what vehicles should be doing and communicate that internally or with riders.

Finally, we added an important splash of color to all the maps in Swiftly, along with one-way street indicators, landmarks, points of interest, and popular businesses. For dispatchers, drawing detours and providing operator instructions will be easier, while customer service staff will benefit from being able to more easily locate and orient riders when they are calling for assistance referencing nearby landmarks.

Better tools to efficiently manage detours

Service disruptions continue to be one of the greatest challenges to agencies’ efforts to provide predictable, reliable service. Whether planned or unplanned, disruptions require agency staff to spring into action to notify passengers, operators, and fellow staff members of changes to scheduled service.

Enter Swiftly’s Service Adjustments, which ensures customers know where to catch the bus when things aren’t running as usual. Agency staff can now automate recurring detours to better handle scenarios such as daily construction or a weekly farmers market. And they can create the same detour across multiple routes at the same time, to efficiently manage disruptions on busy corridors.

Integrating Swiftly’s historical run-time data with popular scheduling tools

As part of Swiftly’s role as a transit data platform, we seek to empower agencies to unlock the value of their own data—whether through the Swiftly dashboard, or in other formats through APIs and data downloads.

That’s why we’ve partnered with three of the most popular scheduling systems to enrich scheduling with Swiftly’s historical run-time data: GIRO HASTUS, Optibus, and Remix.

With these partnerships, we’re empowering planners and schedulers to see how actual vehicle departures differ from planned departures, within the same interface they use to create and update timetables—so they can build more realistic schedules.

Making the industry’s most accurate real-time predictions even better

We are always looking for ways to improve transit data quality and ETA accuracy. Our team deployed algorithmic enhancements that improved ETA accuracy by up to 5%, adding up to a huge increase in prediction accuracy! For every 1,000 riders, 50 more riders will experience accurate on-time predictions.

We also teamed up with Transit, RTD-Denver, Miami-Dade Transit, and more to create a consistent yardstick to measure the accuracy of real-time ETAs: the ETA Accuracy Benchmark. With this tool, agencies can measure this critical aspect of the passenger experience and monitor their progress to improving prediction accuracy.

Reflecting on a year of product innovation

And that’s just the beginning! We also added support for single sign-on with Microsoft, added a data completeness chart in On-Time Performance, achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance, and more. Swiftly deploys over 25 enhancements and bug fixes per week thanks to our incredible team of designers and engineers, a cloud-native architecture that facilitates rapid innovation at high quality, and the invaluable insights we get from working closely with our 190+ transit agency partners worldwide.

At Swiftly, we serve the transit industry because of its impact: helping people get where they need to go. Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, we’re grateful for the insight and partnership of transit agencies of all sizes as we navigate the future together.