Frequently Asked Questions

FlowTransit is route planning and optimization software for public transit. Planners use it to model their network as a digital twin, design and edit routes on real streets, generate optimized alternatives against their own objectives and constraints, and keep the plan current as the city changes.

The GTFS feed you already publish. That alone loads your whole network onto real street geometry. Adding automatic passenger counts (APC), AVL history, or farebox data calibrates the demand model and running times to your riders and your roads.

Yes, both directions. The network loads from your published GTFS, and any approved scenario exports back as GTFS for your scheduling, operations, and rider information systems.

You set the objectives and the constraints: the weights between cost, service, coverage, ridership, travel time and transfers, and hard limits such as fleet size, line lengths, stop spacing and walk access. Flow generates thousands of candidate networks in less than a minute, scores every one on speed, reliability, coverage and cost, and returns the top three, labeled by what each optimizes.

Yes. Constraints and weights come from your policy, not ours, and every scenario reports the assumptions it was scored under. Planners can lock garages and terminals, protect corridors, and edit any generated alternative by hand before it goes anywhere.

Flow concentrates on network design, optimization, and continuous planning: the decisions about where service should run and how often. It does not do vehicle blocking, crew scheduling, or rostering, and it works alongside those systems by exporting approved scenarios as GTFS. Compared with drawing-first planning tools, Flow's difference is the optimizer: it searches alternatives for you and scores every option against your ridership data.

Every scenario reports the change in revenue hours, coverage, and travel time by census block group, tested against the disparate impact and disproportionate burden thresholds your board has adopted, and exports the service equity tables a Title VI review needs.

The model stays live between redesigns. Road closures and new points of interest are absorbed with one click, and Flow watches live data for patterns such as bus bunching and suggests an intervention, so every service change starts from today's network.

Yes. Scenarios carry comments and variants in collaborative mode, so a team can review a redesign, leave notes on the map, and compare each other's alternatives in one place.

Planners and schedulers are part of the team that builds Flow, and development follows the questions working planners bring. A first session usually starts with your own network loaded and a route question you are already working on, and requests from planning teams shape the roadmap.

Any city or region with a GTFS feed, on any scale from a single corridor study to a full network redesign. The demand model calibrates to whatever ridership data you have.

Your workspace is yours. Network and ridership data you load into Flow is used to model your network and is not shared.