Future of Transportation Technology & The Transit Industry Landscape

Operating in a dynamic consumer climate, transit agencies need to stay up-to-date with industry evolutions in order to be ahead of the curve. In addition to that, they need to keep the operational wheels turning, which can stretch resources thin. When internal resources can no longer scale to meet service demands, agencies turn to more efficient practices – automation through transit software. However, choosing the right transit software provider can prove to be an overwhelming process. 

I began my career as an advocate for people who have disabilities.  As a firm believer that the disabled community should be able to travel as freely and as frequently as anyone else, certain obstacles need to be eased or eliminated completely.

Ecolane welcomes Michael Blaylock, an internationally recognized senior executive with more than 30 years of experience in the transportation industry. Michael served as the CEO for the Jacksonville Transportation Authority (JTA), which was Florida’s first expressway authority and one of six agencies in the country with responsibilities for building bridges, highways, and operating a public transport system. Michael set the standard for innovation, professional excellence, technical expertise in planning and design, and commissioning an operational start-up of rail, bus, and ITS infrastructure systems. As a change agent, he is unmatched. Ecolane is delighted to have him join the solutions consultant program.

Ecolane welcomes Mike Scanlon, a leader and a veteran of more than 50 years in the transportation industry. To say that Mike is a seasoned professional is an understatement; he has helped shape the transportation industry as we know it today. He was the CEO of SamTrans, but he also spent 26 years as COO for the Port Authority of Allegheny County (PAT) in Pittsburgh, PA; Six years as CEO of Broward County Transit (BCT) in Florida; 15 years as CEO at the Caltrain, California commuter rail line one the San Francisco Peninsula and in the Santa Clara Valley; 15 years as CEO of San Mateo County Transportation Authority; and Mike is currently an independent consultant for transportation. Ecolane could not be more thrilled to have him join the team as a software solutions consultant.

Last month, CTS Software published a blog post on their website attempting to provide an overview of competitive transit software offerings in the market. Ecolane believes in the importance of healthy, open competition and we wanted to correct a few misconceptions and errors in their post in order to set the record straight.

So let’s look at a few of the things included in the CTS post:

In a traditional scheduling environment, you take all your trips and perform a batch scheduling process the day before the actual trip, either manually or with the help of software. You build your schedule, deal with the outlier trips that don’t fit and optimize to the best of your ability. This is the best your schedule could ever get. Once service hours begin, however, realities of transit their ugly heads. It’s a minor miracle that every vehicle gets out on the road at all, much staying on time amidst heavy traffic, inclement weather, cancellations and other unexpected delays. In a traditional environment, an agency is completely dependent on the dispatcher to keep the schedule from falling apart.

A mobile data terminal (MDT) or mobile digital computer (MDC) is a computerized device used in public transit vehicles and other industries to communicate with a central dispatch office. They are also used to display mapping and information relevant to the tasks and actions performed by the vehicle such as passenger location, ambulatory status & safety information.

As a product manager, one of the most important parts of your job is getting feedback from real live customers, aggregating this feedback, turning it into a viable feature, and eventually passing it along to the engineering team for development.

However, what do you do when the first step in this process seems difficult, if not impossible?This can be a massive problem when dealing with a highly specialized enterprise product as opposed to a broad consumer one. With consumer products, the number of potential users is huge, allowing for random user-testing through the dozens of survey-oriented websites available. However, in order to get any meaningful feedback on an enterprise product, you often need to find a user with a certain baseline level of industry-specific knowledge. This can be a problem for product managers, as these specialized users are often scarce.

Are you the type of person that embraces change, or are you resistant to change because you cannot predict the future? If you answered yes to the latter you’re not alone.  There are many reasons why we are resistant to change, including, but not limited to the fear of the unknown, mistrust and loss of control.

This blog offers convincing evidence into how Ecolane’s real-time route scheduling software will help you make a change from your legacy DRT software to real-time continuous automated software, in order to keep pace with 21^st century modern technology and 21^st century demands on service as baby boomers continue to age.   Change isn’t simply embracing the unknown — it’s about giving up something you are used to for something new and better.

Given that people spend so much of their lives traveling, it's no surprise that so many startups are interested in tackling problems in the transportation industry. Although there has been a lot of hype surrounding electric vehicles, here are three other markets that are likely to emerge as central to the world of transportation in the coming decade: