Denver Regional Transportation District builds accessible ride logistics with Dash Enterprise

Introduction

The Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD) helps over three million people in Colorado’s most populous metropolitan area get where they need to go. RTD offers several web applications that make it possible for passengers to plan their transit routes. One RTD service, called Access-a-Ride, provides bus transportation for passengers with disabilities.

Challenge

IT system developers planned to deliver a customer portal for the service, but delays from an incumbent software vendor led the team to consider building the solution themselves.

Python-savvy members of the team started developing a prototype. Dash’s Python framework enabled the data-driven application to support rich, geospatial mapping to give passengers accurate views of their routes and drop-off times from their mobile devices. Importantly, because Dash is open-source, the team was able to make necessary adjustments to ensure their customer portal was accessible as per WCAG 2.x standards.

The prototype received positive feedback from management, and the team quickly moved the customer portal into production, where it would help passengers on over 2,000 daily trips. During beta testing, the portal received a lot of feedback, which the team was able to incorporate easily and quickly, often pushing out changes within the same day.

Solution

With Dash chosen as the framework for the Access-a-Ride customer portal, other RTD developers began building Dash applications for new use cases in internal data management. By deploying Dash applications within internal operations, different teams could easily visualize and explore the wealth of data that comes with operating metropolitan transportation systems across 2,300 square miles.

Results

These new Dash applications combine important operational data and business intelligence into interactive, multi-page views. Interactive visualizations like color-graded maps and data tables give insight down to the trip or customer level, enabling dispatchers to manage fleet logistics, investigate late trips, and explore vehicle analytics, all towards the goal of ensuring customers get to the right place at the right time.

In light of the successful launch of the Access-a-Ride customer portal and with Dash usage growing internally within RTD, Plotly continues to support the team as they develop and deploy more Dash applications within their organization.