NYC Transit Goes With OpenText for Transit Data

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The New York City Transit authority has tapped OpenText analytics to analyze transit data and help the authority improve performance.

Consisting of 24 subway lines, 224 bus routes and 45,000 employees, New York City Transit Authority (NYCT) is the largest transportation network in North America and serves more than seven million people weekly. According to NYCT, the subway system generates tens of thousands of data records per minute through everything from train sensors to turnstiles. OpenText will be tasked with providing a data management and analytics platform to identify potential service issues and help NYCT plan ahead.

“Our goal was to provide a self-service shop, to let people get customized reports when they need them. With the right tool, NYCT could become much more proactive in how it is monitoring the service and how it’s improving it,” said Anthony Cramer, director of System Data Analysis in the Operations Planning section at NYCT.

According to Cramer, “NYCT is committed to an open data environment. That begins with making as much data as possible available to our customers, from countdown clocks at subway stations to real-time arrival apps, all powered by an open, cloud-based system.”

NYCT is also working to ensure that the platform is robust enough to scale with Big Data demands over time. The platform provides data visualizations on each facet of the transit system and also monitors things like traffic patterns which can lead to bus bunching and other common public transit problems.

As its use of the reporting technology progresses, NYCT plans to push information to the public via mobile devices, allowing its ridership and general public to view and analyze transit performance as well individual bus and subway lines.