Denver CO

Denver’s Regional Transportation District has 208 routes and 12,000 stops. It is a regional system and, therefore, covers distant communities such as Boulder and Longmont. Each weekday has 9,300 vehicle trips with 206,000 boardings. RSM Services installed Ridecheck Plus software in June 2004 with initial data collection by 15 checkers with handheld devices. Later, 60 street supervisors began data collection with laptops mounted in the center console of their vehicles.

Automatic passenger counters came online in February 2005. Additional APC-equipped buses were placed into service in November 2005 and March 2006. RTD has 1,800 vehicles of which 246 buses and 42 light-rail cars have APCs which feed data to Ridecheck Plus. The system has accumulated 3.1 million ridecheck surveys as of November 2011.

The checkers and street supervisors have collected 49,000 ridechecks with handhelds and laptops. Ridecheck Plus is integrated with the agency's Trapeze FX scheduling software.

The database resides on Oracle 10g. As most installations with large data content, some database tables are partitioned for faster performance and ease of maintenance.

The installation has some special implementations. Ridecheck Plus processes AVL data from another vendor system for ontime adherence and running times. The system has 2.2 million AVLchecks (one-way trips). Another example of a special implementation is the collection of log files with vehicle arrival times by station masters at transit centers, and such information is imported as pointchecks into Ridecheck Plus for analysis and reporting.

Denver has 50 users of Ridecheck Plus. In addition to tabular and graphic reports, RTD staff make extensive use of the GIS module of Ridecheck Plus -- overlay software for ESRI’s ArcView product.