At first glance, the City of Commerce is a classic Southern California small town: incorporated in 1960, its 12,823 residents fill 6.6 square miles with Americana activities like the Annual Miss Commerce Pageant and Star Wars Reads Day.
But it's just one train stop from downtown Los Angeles, and sits between two massive edifices: the 700,000-square-foot Assyrian palace-themed Citadel Outlets and The Commerce Hotel and Casino, which features 90,000 square feet of gaming space.
Tax revenue from these two money-making machines subsidize a host of civic services, including a free mass transit system, powered by LA-based transportation tech startup Syncromatics. Incubated at University of Southern California (USC), Syncromatics recently joined forces with Madrid-based GMV and now serves over 150 transit systems across the United States.
"Our system is all based around GPS data and so allows City of Commerce to manage dispatch situations as they arise," Steve White, Director of Marketing & Product Design at Syncromatics, said during a recent tour of the transit control room at the city's Department of Transportation.
"They can also manage voice annunciators on all vehicles, take data from Automated Passenger Counters on the buses and constantly improve efficiency by running reports on key on-time and driver performance metrics. On the customer side, we've installed solar-powered real-time signage at bus stops and created a mobile app that riders use to get real-time information and plan future trips."
"Both the signage at stops and the app have dramatically reduced calls into this office," said Greg Guzman, Fleet Maintenance Supervisor. "Which gives us more time to drill into the details and do tweaks, fine tuning to minutes—we never had that capacity before."
"It's like night and day," agreed Juan Sandoval with Dispatch Operations/Fixed Route. "Before we used to do everything on paper and get information the night before and sit there working out how to change routes, allow adequate pre-trip inspection time, and re-assign drivers when required.
"Now we can re-route instantly or adjust times at stops to take into account people with limited mobility, getting on the buses with wheelchairs and so on. We can also geo-fence an area, like a school district, to track bus speed—and tell the driver to slow down," Sandoval said.
The transit team let PCMag sit in the driver's seat of a 35-foot, heavy-duty transit bus made by New Flyer (another of those #LifeGoals achieved). Sandoval showed us how to log in via a cellular-connected Android tablet, do a diagnostic of a bus route, predict traffic issues, passenger load averages, and prepare to pull away from the bus depot on time (we were restrained from firing up the ignition, sadly).
Related
- Mercedes Self-Driving Bus Gives Your Commute an UpgradeMercedes Self-Driving Bus Gives Your Commute an Upgrade
So what's next for the Syncromatics software? "In the near future, we'll be adding infotainment screens to all buses, which show riders information about upcoming stops, nearby attractions, and will allow the city to sell advertising as desired," White said. "Pre-trip inspection software will help the city move from a fully paper-based maintenance inspection system to a digital one, making inspections and records management easier."
On a final, geeky, note: if you want to see a classic era transit control system in action, check out The Italian Job (the 1969 original, not the remake), in which clever Mini Coopers are pushed to the limit and a Turin traffic mainframe is hilariously hacked. It's worth watching just to see how it all used to work, before systems like those from Syncromatics came into play.