NTD Reporting Just Got A Little Easier
Transit professionals have a complicated relationship with National Transit Database (NTD) data. On the one hand, there’s a lot to love: NTD data unlocks between 20% and 50% of each transit agency’s annual budget, or a total of $5 billion in federal grants nationwide every year.
Unfortunately there’s a less rosy side of things as well. We hear time and again about the time-consuming, tedious nature of aggregating NTD-related datasets. Agencies often describe spending weeks sourcing data from their CAD/AVL and APC systems, typically in hard-to-use formats, to get the metrics they need. Or as one planner put it more bluntly: “Pulling data for the NTD is the bane of my existence. It’s truly mind-numbing work.” Much less rosy indeed.
That’s why we’re excited to introduce Service Delivery and NTD Reporting Tools, a new set of features that aim to streamline the process of pulling common transit datasets, including those used for NTD reports.
Swiftly’s new Service Delivery and NTD Reporting Tools give agencies easy access to the raw transit data they need for common data applications, including the most important metrics required by the NTD.
Service Delivery and NTD Reporting Tools include 3 data exports:
While these reports still require some manipulation before being submitted to the NTD, they automate the most time-consuming aspects of NTD data collection. They’re downloadable in a .csv file format for easy use in Excel or other data processings software, and all datasets are customizable by route and time period. This ease of access is aimed to foster cross-functional collaboration and faster decision making.
And most importantly, we built these datasets with NTD reporting specifically in mind. Our hope is that agencies can bypass their CAD/AVL and APC systems altogether, finding their most important raw NTD-related transit data in one central place.
We built these datasets to aid with NTD reporting, but they are by no means limited to NTD applications. Here are other top ways they can help streamline agency workflows:
Ready to try it out? Service Delivery and NTD Reporting Tools are now available to all Swiftly users with access to the On-Time Performance product. Reach out for a demo to see how it works!
This article was originally published by Swiftly.
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