San Diego CA

The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) purchased Ridecheck Plus for two transit agencies in San Diego County with five services -- Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) bus service, North County Transit District (NCTD) bus service, MTS Trolley light rail, NCTD Coaster commuter rail and NCTD Sprinter light rail. These agencies have 240 routes, 11,000 stops and 7,800 weekday trips. Upon contract award, Ridecheck Plus was used for manual data collection by checker staff with paper and handheld devices. Handhelds are synchronized over the web and account for 6,200 surveys collected in the fiscal year 2010. Ridecheck Plus also holds 110,000 ridecheck surveys for 1994-2007 as imported from a legacy system.

RSM Services hosts the ridership data on SQL Server at a secure server farm in Houston, TX. The information is served up to agency staff and contractors via the web. The public has access to a limited number of PDF reports on the main web page.

MTS initially deployed 69 vehicles equipped with automatic passenger counter by ACS; and now number 171 buses. In a more recent implementation, Ridecheck Plus concurrently processes APC data from two other vendor systems for NCTD bus, NCTD light rail and MTS trolley. There are 381 APC-equipped buses and rail cars in the county.

Validation procedures of Ridecheck Plus reject questionable or incomplete data. Ridecheck Plus does balancing of ons and offs over a trip, and merges unknown stops to the nearest known stops.

The Ridecheck Plus database retains 1.2 million ridecheck surveys (one-way trips) from APCs as of November 2011. Agency staff build user-defined filters and run tabular and graphic reports, and also analyze ridership in a geographic environment using the GIS Module of Ridecheck Plus.

Ridecheck Plus is fully integrated with Giro's Hastus scheduling system for transit system information (routes, directions, stops, timepoints, patterns, blocks, runs and scheduled trips). In a special implementation, Ridecheck Plus imports and displays extended attributes for stops from a third-party stop inventory system.

RSM Services is under contract to support and maintain Ridecheck Plus to June 2015.