FlowTransit is planning software for transit agencies. It models your whole network from your GTFS and your own passenger counts, generates alternatives, and reports what each one does to travel time, ridership, coverage and operating cost.
Agencies weigh these same four considerations in nearly every service decision, usually with a different data source behind each one and no single place to see them together. FlowTransit calculates all four for any network you draw, by the same method every time, so two options can be compared directly.
Modeled door-to-door journey time, including the walk to the stop, the wait, and any transfer along the way.
On-time performance and headway adherence modeled from your AVL history, with the recovery time each route needs to absorb running-time variation.
Vehicles required, revenue hours and revenue miles, including deadhead and layover,, calculated per scenario so the trade against service quality is explicit.
How many destinations residents can reach on a 45-minute door-to-door budget, broken out by neighborhood.
Most bus networks were never designed in one piece. Corridors were set decades ago, terminals were placed where land happened to be cheap, and each budget cycle trimmed or added at the edges. Very few agencies have had the chance to ask what the network would look like if it were drawn today.
FlowTransit starts from your demand data: boardings and alightings by stop and by hour, plus the origin-to-destination patterns inferred from them. That evidence drives the design, so the working question becomes which network serves those trips.
The heaviest flow, ghosted into the second panel, is served by a route that detours through the centre. FlowTransit scores your current network against your own demand data and surfaces exactly these corridors.
Point FlowTransit at the GTFS you already publish and the full network loads onto real street geometry. Add APC or farebox counts and the demand model calibrates to them; without those, it estimates demand from land use and journey-to-work data.
A trained optimizer searches route and frequency combinations against your demand data and returns complete candidate networks, weighted between passenger time and operating cost at the ratio you choose.
Each scenario is scored against the service currently running, route by route, with both networks drawn on the same map.
Export the approved scenario as GTFS, plus board maps and the service equity tables your Title VI analysis needs.
No overnight batch run. Change a headway, move a terminus or cut a branch and the whole network re-scores in under a second, including the riders who shift onto and off every other route. At that speed planners test the borderline options they would normally skip.
wait modeled from your headway distribution, not headway divided by two
Routes follow roads a bus can drive, so running times come from real road distance and turns. Headways are set by period, span of service and branches are edited directly, and running times come from your AVL history rather than from geometry alone.
One network is held as the master plan, beginning as the service running today. Differences are attributed route by route, so if Route 6 improves only because riders shifted onto a faster parallel line, the report shows the shift alongside the gain.
Boardings and alightings are reported by stop, and passenger load is tracked along each section of a route against the capacity of the vehicle assigned to it. A frequency change that relieves crowding in one corridor while creating it in the next is visible before the schedule is written.
An approved scenario exports as GTFS, so the change reaches trip planners and rider apps without anyone retyping a timetable. Maps, comparison tables and service equity analysis are generated from that same scenario.
Most redesigns are budget-neutral, so service added in one place comes out of another, and the board will ask which neighborhoods absorbed the loss. FlowTransit reports the change in revenue hours, coverage and travel time by census block group, and tests it against the disparate impact and disproportionate burden thresholds your board has adopted.
Accessibility is modeled door to door for an 8am departure, including walk and wait: how many jobs, clinics and schools a resident can reach in 45 minutes, and how that count changes for households without a car. Agencies produce this analysis for Title VI review regardless, so it is generated from the same scenario under evaluation.
Network redesigns are still commonly run as consultant studies, and between those studies planners work with a GIS layer and a spreadsheet. Neither arrangement lets an agency ask a question and get an answer the same week.