Inside Trapeze and Vontas

What does mobility planning really mean today? Let's get the answer.

Mobility Planning and Scheduling, the MPS product group, encompasses more than just planning or just scheduling. It’s bigger. It’s aspirational. It’s an ethos that moving people from A to B is less about what moves them, and more about getting people to the places that will make their lives better.

I sat down with MPS Product Director to talk about MPS, what it means, and how it is helping reshape how we think about delivering public transit.

Learn more about MPS or download the Future of Mobility Planning ebook.

Transit agencies are awash in data. From vehicles to passengers to demographics to everything else, public transit thrives on data. The challenge is there is so much data it can be hard to make heads or tails of it, much less use it to make business decisions. 

Garrett Vandendries is the Product Director for Data and Analytics and he talks with Tris about ViewPoint and how it can become your agency's operations nerve center. Built on 30 years of transit data experience, ViewPoint gives you easy tools to answer your more important questions.

Competitive grants are an essential component of every transit agency's funding and budget. Many projects, big and small, capital or not, rely on government grants to make them happen.

Joanne Scattolon of Trapeze and Eliot Bacon of Vontas help agencies with their grant applications an offer some advice on how to write better, or even great, grant proposals.

Music by Derek K. Miller

Tris Hussey, Producer of Transit Unplugged, and Langdon Kessner of Vontas chat with Vontas Technical Sales Specialist Matt Goedken about service disruptions and Disruption Management. It's a fact that in public transit, things don't always go to plan, but Vontas TransitMaster gives agencies powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use tools to manage disruptions, notify drivers, and communicate with riders almost like magic.

Music by Derek K. Miller

Tris and sales engineer Satpal Bamrah talk about State of Good Repair (SGR), TAM reports (Transit Asset Management), and Trapeze Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) solutions. This year transit agencies across the U.S. have to submit their TAM reports. These massive reports need to detail every asset at an agency.

Satpal explains SGR, TAM, and how EAM helps take the pain out of compiling these reports.

Music by Derek K. Miller

So what's the deal here? It all started with talking with the keynote speakers for ThinkTransit and how to share more about what we do with you.

Music by Derek K. Miller.

Mark Godin was one of the editors of the UITP report on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and the Blockchain in public transit. You might not think public transit and the blockchain as two things that go together, but there is a lot of promise to using secure and trusted transactions in transit.

Mark goes into what DLTs are, what they could be used for in transit, and some of the experiments already being tested around the world.

Read Mark's post on the Trapeze blog about the report and his thoughts on DLTs.

Music by Derek K. Miller.

This is a "director's cut" of an interview with Tyler Dvorak, Product Director for Mobility, Planning, and Scheduling for Trapeze, and Terry Bills of Esri talking about the role of rich datasets in mobility planning today.

This interview was recorded in August of 2021 and part of a Transit Unplugged episode.

Music: Dodging Buses by Derek K. Miller

Tris Hussey and Product Manager Sabrina Blais talk about Trapeze RISC (Risk, Incident, and Safety Compliance) and how to break down data silos. Transit and rail agencies have built their Safety Management Systems (SMS), but now face the task of tracking progress to goals. The big challenge: data silos. Safety and incident data is trapped in departmental data silos. Learn how RISC is going to change that.

Read more in Sabrina's blog post: Breaking Down Safety Data Silos.

Music "Dodging Buses" by Derek K. Miller.

In our fourth episode, Tris and Randi talk with Trapeze GM Teresa Domingo and Vontas GM Peter Aczel about their first year on the job, their visions for public transit, how we help customers, and what they are looking forward to at ThinkTransit.

Teresa and Peter will kick off ThinkTransit with their opening address before Terry White's keynote address. These two dynamic leaders have strong and compatible visions for their respective companies and how we work together.

ThinkTransit is coming up March 20-23 in Forth Worth TX. Register now to experience all the sessions, hands-on training, and inspiring speakers over the three days of the conference.