Public Transportation Software

What is Public Transportation Software?

Public Transportation Software manages operations and public transit infrastructure. The software manages timetables and ticketing. It also provides customer web portals and mobile apps for transit schedule information, ticket purchases, and electronic ticketing. Geolocation tracking keeps transit administrators and riders updated on the real-time status of scheduled trains and buses.

The software can assign drivers, plan routes, and manage fleet maintenance. It helps oversee passenger safety and security and supports ADA-compliant access for riders with disabilities with on-demand dispatch. Customer communication features permit customer feedback on service quality. Driver mobile apps accept fares electronically, capture trip data, and support driver routing and scheduling.

The software captures metrics concerning route and rider traffic, along with operational and maintenance costs. Public transportation software provides analytics and simulations regarding passengers to support more efficient resource utilization and better planning.

Some vendors include back-office functions that cover administrative tasks, accounting, and asset management. A few offer transit consulting services for reviewing transit operations, planning, and transitioning from legacy systems.

Public Transportation Software is commonly deployed as a hosted service and overlaps with MaaS (Mobility-as-a-Service) which supports commuters in planning and purchasing daily travel across all public and private transportation options in a city, bus, train, tram, subway, bikes, scooters, taxis, and car services. In the future, expect 5G, IoT, and edge computing features to be increasingly adopted to support public transportation software, providing increased efficiency, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.

Public Transportation Software Features

Public Transportation Software will have many of the following features.

• Route planning and optimization
• Scheduling (driver and equipment)
• Ticketing (mobile, web, phone)
• Real-time transportation status, geolocation, and fleet tracking
• Driver management (routes and schedules)
• Fleet maintenance
• On-demand and paratransit dispatch management
• Customer mobile apps and self-service web portals for schedules, reservations, ticket purchases, real-time transport status, account updates, and service reviews
• Driver mobile apps for ticket scanning, trip data, routing, scheduling, defect, and incident logging
• Detour management
• Dashboard for transit status
• Customer profiles and preferences, discounts, payment options, and refunds
• Metrics on riders, equipment, destinations, mileage, on-time performance, revenue, operational and maintenance costs, passenger, and equipment history
• Analytics
• Safety and security compliance
• White label
• POS integration
• SaaS, web, and mobile apps

Public Transportation Software Comparison

Consider the following when purchasing Public Transportation Software.

Use Case: Some products like Moovit focus on the customer transit experience, on-demand transport, and real-time mobility analytics for cities. EzTransport supports small and mid-sized municipalities. Others like Ratality focus on bus transportation.

Forecasting and Planning: Tools are available such as TransCAD that specialize in modeling transportation networks and travel demand to forecast traffic, help plan public transportation services, and develop transit strategies and solutions.

Convenience and Efficiency: For customer convenience and driver efficiency look for software that offers mobility app solutions such as Ecolane or Moovit.

Pricing Information

Depending on your public transportation infrastructure, requirements, and goals vendors will provide a custom price quote. Free trials are available.