Transit Tips & Tricks for Navigating COVID-19

Transit Tips & Tricks for Navigating COVID-19

Our team of transit experts here at TripSpark have compiled some transit tips and how they can be implemented with our Streets software.

 

Adjusting Your Vehicle Capacities

Ensuring your vehicles are equipped to maintain social distancing guidelines on-board can be daunting – but modifying a few settings in Streets Admin can simplify things immensely.

Adjusting your Vehicle Capacities to abide by new guidelines and setting Passenger Volume alert notifications to come through Dispatch will inform your dispatchers when a vehicle has reached its new “capacity”. Your Dispatchers can then make informed decisions and plan how to accommodate full buses before the end of their route.

Check out this article in our customer portal (available only for current customers) for a step-by-step guide on how to change your capacities and create an Alert Notification.

 

Using Streets Work Management to Cancel Trips and Keep Riders Informed

Things are changing rapidly, and it can be difficult to plan for schedule reductions. Using Streets Work Management, you can easily cancel trips as needed keeping your schedule up to date. An added bonus is that it will automatically inform your riders of the change through our passenger information application,MyRide.

Check out this article in our customer portal (available only for current customers)  for a step-by-step guide.

 

Using 'MyRide News' During COVID-19 to Keep Riders Updated

Being an essential service during a pandemic is challenging. Keeping your riders updated on daily changes that are affecting your region due to COVID-19 can be facilitated with Streets MyRide – News functionality.

If you are an Administrator or Employee who has access to the MyRide Admin Portal, you can use the News Management feature to post important messages for your riders.

Creating messages is easy and they can be live as soon as you hit publish or, they can be scheduled to be posted at a certain date and time. Riders subscribed to route alerts in their MyRide account will receive the notification via SMS or email. The message can also be posted as 'General' to be sent out system-wide or Route Specific (convenient when only certain routes will be affected by closures or ride adjustments). Everyone can access the post through the NEWS page of your site, regardless of their settings, making it accessible to all.

Once posted, you can see your post in MyRide News and click on the social media share buttons – for Facebook and Twitter – to share the post across all platforms.

Check out this article in our customer portal (available only for current customers) for a step-by-step guide on how to post messages.

Take a look at this live example of how Go City Bus – Indiana is using this feature to their advantage, helping spread their messages and keep riders informed on service changes.

 

Manage Vehicles that Reach New COVID-19 Capacities Before the End of Line

If a vehicle reaches capacity halfway through its route, your Dispatchers can create a tripper and dispatch an additional bus to complete the run. The full bus can then become a drop-off only vehicle. Once posted your driver will receive their trip information on their Mobile Data Terminal (Ranger). They will be able to view and maintain their RSA, alert riders of next stop announcements to maintain ADA requirements and accurately capture passenger boards and alights through Ranger manually or through your APCs.

Check out this article on creating Tripppers (available only for current customers) for a step-by-step guide.

 

Updating Your TBox Script File to Add COVID-19-Specific Scheduled Announcements

Making COVID-19 announcements is simple. Using our TBox Scheduled Announcements feature, you can schedule announcements to play by date, time, or at set intervals. Simply add them to your list, upload to Streets Schedule and apply the script changes to your XMM profile. The messages will update automatically over the air.

Take a look at this guide on how to make these adjustments or check out this article in our customer portal (available only for current customers) for a step-by-step guide.

For more information or assistance, please contact your TripSpark Client Care Specialist by emailing cc@tripspark.com or by calling 1-877-411-8727 (toll-free).

Our team is here for you, and we will get through these times by Moving Together.