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Design your network around today's trips
With Flow, design faster, more reliable public transit networks that get the most people where they're going. Compute millions of scenarios in minutes to find the best options for your city, before moving a single signpost.
Resilient networks that keep up with your city
Neighborhoods rise, jobs move, and demand shifts block by block. Flow starts every plan from the trips people are making right now: where riders get on, where they get off, and the origin-to-destination patterns in your ridership data.
When one mid-sized city redesigned its network around those trips, after its population quadrupled while the routes remained unchanged, bus ridership doubled within a year. Flow is route planning and optimization software built for exactly that work. It serves public transit agencies and private operators and consultancies, from a single corridor study to a full network redesign.
What Flow gives transit planners
Design and manage your network
Move a stop, reroute a street, retime headway. The whole network re-scores in real time, so you can see the impact of every change.
- Drag and drop routes that snap to real streets
- Headways and spans set per line, per period
- Map layers for demand, travel times, population and jobs, car ownership, schools and hospitals, and more
- Plan together: comments and variants in collaborative mode
Optimize the network
Enter your tradeoffs and Flow generates millions of alternative designs in minutes, delivering the top three candidates for your requirements.
- Weights and constraints straight from your policy
- Every option scored on speed, reliability, coverage, and cost
- The top three come back, labeled by what they optimize
Continuous planningBeta
Adjust your network with one click for road closures or new points of interest, or let Flow detect patterns in live data, such as bus bunching, and suggest an intervention.
- Road closures rerouted with one click
- New schools, hospitals, and venues absorbed into the plan
- Bunching and demand shifts flagged with a suggested fix
What Flow gives transit planners
Design and manage your network
Move a stop, reroute a street, retime headway. The whole network re-scores in real time, so you can see the impact of every change.
- Drag and drop routes that snap to real streets
- Headways and spans set per line, per period
- Map layers for demand, travel times, population and jobs, car ownership, schools and hospitals, and more
- Plan together: comments and variants in collaborative mode
Every euro invested in public transportation goes the maximum km
A network is a negotiation between objectives and constraints: the speed, coverage, and ridership you want, against the vehicles, drivers, and budget you have.
Flow makes that negotiation explicit. Objectives carry weights you control, constraints are hard limits the optimizer cannot spend past, and the result is the networks that get the most from a fixed service budget, measured in trips people take.
Works with the data you already have
Flow runs on the feeds and counts your agency already produces, and sends its work back out the same way: approved scenarios, maps, and reports in the formats your other systems expect.
GTFS in and out
The network loads from the feed you publish, and approved scenarios export back to your scheduling and rider information systems.
APC and AVL
Passenger counts calibrate the demand model, and running times and on-time performance come from your AVL history.
Demand modeling
Origin-to-destination patterns are estimated from your counts, so scenarios are scored against real demand.
Decision exports
Board maps, scenario scorecards, and the service equity tables a Title VI review needs.
Built by transit planners, for transit planners
Flow is developed with a team of leading planners and schedulers whose experience spans designing citywide BRT networks and their feeder systems, writing national strategic plans for public transportation, and teaching transit planning at the university level. That planning experience is paired with deep expertise in computational mathematics. The possible configurations of a city's route network are astronomically many, which is why planning tools have always had to simplify; Flow's optimizer holds every route, frequency, and constraint at once and searches the whole problem directly. And we build alongside the planners who use Flow: agencies bring their most challenging transit questions, we model them together, and Flow carries the work through to the plan that reaches the board.
See it on your own network
Book a walkthrough and bring the route question you're working on.
Book a demo