Urban Transportation Associates Improves Public Transit Service Nationwide with SPSS Predictive Analytics Software

Urban Transportation Associates Improves Public Transit Service Nationwide with SPSS Predictive Analytics Software

Atlanta Transit Authority Optimizes Service Scheduling and Transit Demand

CHICAGO, 08/10/09 —

August 10, 2009 – Worldwide, public transportation agencies face a barrage of challenges – cuts in public transit funding, rising energy costs, pressure from environmental groups to ‘go green,’ and uncertain gas prices. To improve efficiency of bus and train operations and better serve the public, Urban Transportation Associates (UTA) employs sophisticated Predictive Analytics Software (PASW^®) from SPSS Inc. (Nasdaq: SPSS), the leading global provider of Predictive Analytics software and solutions.

UTA is a 20-year old transportation consulting agency working with more than 80 North American public transit agencies, including SEPTA (Philadelphia), MDT (Miami), MUNI (San Francisco), CMTA (Austin), LYNX (Orlando), DART (Dallas), MARTA (Atlanta), AC Transit (Oakland), and MBTA (Boston). The organization uses the world’s leading statistical software suite, PASW Statistics (formerly SPSS Statistics) to improve public transit systems by evaluating the quality and productivity of existing service.

Tom Kowalski, president of UTA, said, “Public transportation affects millions of people everyday and, therefore, accurate information on transit ridership and the overall system is vital to improve efficiency of operations and better serve the public. SPSS Predictive Analytics technology is the data microscope for agencies to understand and interpret areas of strength or weakness in transit operations to support or justify necessary changes in service.”

UTA developed a mobile data acquisition system called Automatic Passenger Counting (APC) that consists of multiple sensors placed on a transit vehicle, such as a bus or train. This system collects a wide range of operational data, including ridership, and records events such as bus stop frequency, run times, bicycle rack usage, wheel chair lift cycles, and passenger boarding and disembarking. Each recorded event is tagged with a latitude and longitude from the embedded GPS system in the APC.

Using PASW Statistics, UTA analyzes information on ridership and provides the information to transit managers, planners and schedulers as key insight into rider usage, traffic patterns, service scheduling and resource allocation to optimize and forecast transit demand. Public transportation agencies use this information to understand where to increase bus or train service to alleviate overcrowding, or where to eliminate routes due to a lack of ridership.

For example, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), the ninth-largest system in the United States, operating a multi-modal system with over 130 bus routes and daily ridership of nearly 500,000, relies heavily on UTA and SPSS Predictive Analytics technology when conducting analysis to improve system efficiencies. MARTA utilizes UTA data from PASW Statistics for numerous types of analysis, including service assessments, route productivity reports, bus stop utilization, spatial data accuracy, route and trip-level ridership activity, and customized ridership reports.