At Swiftly, we take pride in listening to our users and pushing the boundaries of innovation. Regularly, our product teams go looking for feedback, but in other cases, our transit agency partners come knocking on our door with a shared problem that is too good (or bad) not to solve.

Over the last year, operations teams have been asking us the same questions: “How can we get ahead of issues before they become performance problems? How do we manage service proactively?”

Today, we’re sharing a big enhancement to Swiftly’s Live Operations that tackles just that, thanks in huge part to agency feedback along the way.

Introducing Issues in Live Operations

Issues in Live Operations surfaces problems within the network in real-time so that operations staff can identify, prioritize, and resolve issues proactively.

“You have to manage service in the present. Using Swiftly really empowered the staff to get a big picture of what's happening, live. We improved our bus on-time performance by 10%, which was a historic gain never seen here before.”
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—Mike Pal, Chief Transportation Officer, Valley Metro

The new tool displays route performance, prioritized by the routes with the most real-time issues and filterable by issue type. Dispatchers can now manage system performance proactively by addressing the routes with the most issues, or by focusing on a certain type of issue—missing service, off-route vehicles, late layover departures, early trips, and more.

Managing disruptions with Service Adjustments

We’re also releasing new tools for Service Adjustments so that staff can efficiently take action to adjust service and manage disruptions.

Service Adjustments now supports new types of adjustments, specifically partial trip cancellations and detours at the start of routes. With this new functionality, agencies can better communicate complex disruption scenarios with passengers, staff, and bus operators.

Using Swiftly’s Live Operations to boost proactivity

With Issues in Live Operations, operations staff get glanceable insights into route- and direction-level performance and issues, with the ability to zero in on problem areas in less than a second.

The effect? Let’s hear from OCC Manager Tristan Landrum at MDOT MTA.

“It takes away a lot of the guesswork. It takes away the starting point part. You know where to start, where to focus your energy. As you correct the problems, it tones it down. We don’t have to figure out where to start.”

The first stop on your journey to proactive operations

Are we stopping here? Never! At Swiftly, we believe technology should evolve as fast as transit agency needs do. These enhancements to Live Operations are a step in our journey toward supporting agencies with more ways to proactively address and communicate service issues. If you’re already a Swiftly customer, tap your account manager to learn more and give your feedback along the way.

Transit agencies with access to Live Operations can now see these enhancements automatically in the Swiftly dashboard! Swiftly’s cloud native transit data platform does not require downloads or software updates. Just log in to Swiftly and you'll see the new functionality when you open Real-Time Stats in the Live Map. We're built for innovation and deploy over 30 updates per week, so agencies never have to wait for upgrades or fear perilous downtime.

Want to experience the newly improved Live Operations firsthand? Request a demo below.