Executive summary

Since becoming Swiftly’s first Canadian customer in 2020, Durham Region Transit (DRT) has turned mountains of raw data into reliable, actionable insights.

With Swiftly, DRT planners and schedulers make targeted interventions to have the most impact on service reliability. Customer service staff can resolve rider calls in seconds without unnecessary escalations or delays. As a result, the agency has improved on-time performance (OTP), the rider experience, and operational efficiency.

Key outcomes:

• Following a targeted service change informed by Swiftly data, DRT saw OTP improve by 9 percentage points on key routes
• Planners can now find, diagnose, and correct schedule issues that were previously hard to spot in service data
• Customer service staff resolve rider calls within minutes, reducing supervisor escalations and passenger frustration from delayed responses
• DRT obtained unlimited user access to vehicle tracking and playback across Operations and Customer Service, granting all staff access and eliminating per-user licensing costs

Mountains of data, but no way to use it

DRT serves one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the Greater Toronto Area, connecting communities across Durham Region. Before partnering with Swiftly, DRT was looking to better leverage data from its CAD/AVL system for insights that could help improve service performance.

“Our CAD/AVL system was producing an enormous volume of data, but we didn’t have an efficient way to leverage it all.”

—Jack Phelan, Manager of Policy and Planning, DRT

When DRT’s planning team looked to improve OTP, they had no efficient way to identify where to focus. Which routes had the worst performance issues, and at what times of day?

The planning team knew the answers were in the data. But historical performance analysis was time-consuming, and schedule adjustments were often based on small samples and anecdotal evidence.

“Before, finding problems to address meant reacting to customer and operator complaints. You’d go and work on something, not knowing that there was a bigger problem out there that nobody was mentioning,” said Jack Phelan, DRT’s Manager of Policy and Planning.

Turning guesswork into data-driven decisions

With Swiftly, the DRT team receives actionable insights into service performance. They can easily see which routes are struggling and at what time of day. Staff can access data-backed suggestions in Run-Times and visually spot reliability issues in daily schedules with On-Time Performance. This allows DRT planners and schedulers to make the targeted interventions that will have the most impact on service reliability.

“Problems stand out really well in Swiftly. The dashboard makes it easy to quickly see the problem.”

—Jack Phelan, Manager of Policy and Planning, DRT

When DRT’s scheduling team used Swiftly to review key routes for schedule adjustments, OTP on those routes improved by 9 percentage points. For riders, that translated to fewer missed buses, shorter wait times, and more predictable commutes.

Empowering customer service with instant answers and unlimited access

DRT's customer service team relies on Swiftly’s Live Operations and GPS Playback to see every vehicle in the network in real time and replay any past trip to check exactly where a bus was and when.

“With Swiftly, if a customer calls with questions about their bus, getting answers is super fast. Calls get resolved at the first point of contact,” added Phelan. This means staff resolve most inquiries without needing to loop in a supervisor. It’s a faster, smoother experience for riders, and a more efficient workflow for the team.

Neil Harkness, Program Manager for Transit Technical Services at DRT, noted that Swiftly’s GPS Playback is easy to use, saving staff time and providing great customer service to riders.

He also pointed out that Swiftly's unlimited-user model allows more staff to use the tools they need at no additional cost.

“Getting performance insights and real-time vehicle information into the hands of our customer service staff was a priority. Swiftly's unlimited user accounts gave them the tools they needed.”

—Neil Harkness, Program Manager, Transit Technical Services, DRT

An intuitive platform with no learning curve

Multiple teams across DRT seamlessly adopted Swiftly tools into their workflows. From planning and scheduling to customer service and the operations control center, staff picked up Swiftly with ease. While the platform handles complex data analysis behind the scenes, what users see is straightforward and easy to interpret at a glance. Today, nearly 70 DRT staff members across planning, scheduling, customer service, and control center operations use Swiftly day to day.

“One thing we like about Swiftly is that the interface is really intuitive. It's so easy to use.”

—Jack Phelan, Manager of Policy and Planning, DRT

Improving the rider experience while reducing operational costs

For DRT, Swiftly has delivered on a simple promise: make transit data work for the agency. Planners can now find problems they didn't know existed. Customer service can resolve rider inquiries on the spot. And service is more reliable for bus riders.

As Canada's first Swiftly customer, DRT has proven that the right data tools don't just solve today's problems. They change how an agency operates.‍

“Swiftly is a really efficient and intuitive tool for looking at historical data and performance. If you are trying to understand what happened yesterday, what happened last week, why you keep getting complaints about that one trip—it’s a really useful, quick way of getting to the bottom of those issues.”

—Jack Phelan, Manager of Policy and Planning, DRT