Concord CA

CCCTA in Concord, CA has a system of 31 routes and 1,300 stops. It serves a region east of San Francisco bay area including the communities of Clayton, Concord, Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill and Orinda. A large number of CCCTA’s buses feed the BART rail system.

CCCTA runs 1,035 vehicle trips each weekday. Annual ridership is three million. RSM Services installed Ridecheck Plus software in September 2008. Initially, one-half of the fleet had APCs. Now, the entire fleet of 131 buses have automatic passenger counters by Clever Devices. The system has accumulated 570,000 ridecheck surveys as of November 2011.

Ridecheck Plus is integrated with scheduling information from the agency’s Trapeze FX system. Ridecheck Plus considers daily schedule variations, such school day and non-school day trips, in deriving monthly ridership estimates. CCCTA reports boardings and passenger miles to the FTA’s NTD program using APC data. Agency staff uses the GIS Module of Ridecheck Plus to do geographic analysis of ridership.

Independent of passenger counting by APCs, fare payment methods of patrons, such as adult, child and BART transfer, are passed to Ridecheck Plus for fare payment reporting. The system has business rules to validate incoming fare data.

Since acquiring the new ridership reporting system, CCCTA has instituted major route and schedule changes by analysis of APC data through Ridecheck Plus. This effort has resulted in a $4 million reduction in operating expenses.