AC Transit Contract Work
During my 2 years providing service to AC Transit (California's third largest transportation district.), I directed research, development, and implementation of large scale mass transportation research projects. I Developed work plans, designed and developed feasibility papers, and generated benefit / cost assessments. I also prepared project plans and recommendations for senior management.
The two big projects I managed for AC Transit consisted of the following:
Project Management of the periodic AC Transit Passenger Rider Survey. The project lasted over two years. The project included several subcontractors and at its peak require the supervision 20 individuals.
One of the interesting items I worked on for the survey was the problem of people using suffixes in their survey answers for things like street. Some recorded street, st., ST, an so on. So, I Geo-Coded the data, using the MapInfo Geographic Information System (GIS), the results of AC Transits 1993 On-Board Passenger Survey. Then I developed a program to extract the Base Map data to a spell check database for the purpose of cleaning the survey responses. The response rate was still too low, therefore, I wrote a MapBasic application to substitute prefixes and suffixes to each response and then fed it to the coding sub-system. This produced an approximate hit rate of 50% of those records which had the street and cross-street fields populated.
In addition to the above survey project, I created their first computerized passenger ridership analysis system for AC Transit. Prior to this time all work on projecting changes at a buss trip level had been done on 2 foot tall stacks of paper schedules with rulers, pencils, and hand calculators. This analysis consisted of converting passenger counts by bus trip, to a database of information which could be analyzed in SPSS. The final reports were detailed boarding graphs which showed the passenger loads on an individual bus trip, by route, and by time of trip. This took six months to accomplish and produced reports consisting of approximately six hundred pages for each quarter analyzed.
The new system provided more quantity and quality of information than the old one and freed up several people for other more productive work.. This system was so successful, that AC Transit contracted with me, and a team of programmers at Office Information Systems, to extend the systems capability to include a tool for modeling the Transit Systems route and schedule structure.