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 millions of candidate networks in minutes, 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. Planned events work the same way: a football match, a marathon, or a street closure gets its service plan drawn in advance and rolled back after. Continuous planning is currently in beta access.

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.

Flow's optimization centers on the bus network, and it treats the street as part of the design: bus lanes and bike lanes can be drawn and tested alongside the routes they serve. Rail and other fixed modes load as the backbone the buses connect to, and Flow builds timetables around them, synchronizing feeder schedules with heavy transit so transfers land. Scenarios are scored on door-to-door trips across modes rather than bus legs in isolation. Planning for light rail and trains is coming soon.

Yes. Flow trains forecasting models on your last year of operations, the AVL and APC history, and forecasts how each day is likely to run: running times, loads, and timetable adherence for the specific day ahead rather than an all-year average. The forecast keeps updating through the day, so when the morning slips, the impact on the rest of the day is visible early enough to act on.

Yes. The same model that scores today's demand can load the city you expect: new housing, a campus, a rezoned corridor, projected population growth. Planners design the network against that future demand and see what should change ahead of time, so service is ready when the growth arrives.

Yes. Consultancies use Flow to examine more alternatives inside a study window and deliver reports under their own branding, and operators use it to prepare tender bids with the tender's requirements set as hard constraints. The same scoring and exports apply; see Flow for consultants and operators.

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. Flow's models are not trained on any agency's data. If that ever changes, we will tell agencies in advance, and any agency can opt out.