GIRO has won a METRO Innovative Solutions Award for its Customer Impact Simulator (CIS), a planning tool developed in collaboration with LA Metro. The awards, presented annually by Bobit Business Media’s METRO Magazine, recognize significant innovations achieved by collaborations between solutions providers and agencies operating public transit bus services.

The CIS was developed to meet the needs of LA Metro’s planners as they prepared the NextGen project, which reinvented and improved the bus network in Los Angeles County, making it more relevant and attractive to existing and new customers without increasing operating costs.

Incorporated into the NetPlan module of GIRO’s HASTUS public transit optimization software, the CIS enables transit planners to consider travel quality and the customer perspective when evaluating different scenarios generated with NetPlan. The CIS was used in every stage of LA Metro’s network redesign: analyzing ridership on the current network; evaluating new scenarios in relation to available resources as well as to their impacts on riders; developing optimized timetables; and public outreach. LA Metro started implementing the NextGen Bus Plan on its bus network in December 2020.

“We thank the awards panel for recognizing the CIS as a timely innovation that increases bus operators’ ability to consider customers’ perspectives while responding to changing circumstances,” said David Fabi, GIRO’s Vice President – Development and Technology. “Rebalancing of networks may be required repeatedly throughout the post-COVID-19 recovery. The CIS supports transit agencies’ ability to make rapid strategic decisions and use reliable, data-driven scenarios to optimize their bus networks.”

METRO Magazine’s Innovative Solutions Awards recognize innovations developed in partnerships between solutions providers and bus operators within the previous year. Innovations recognized in the 2021 awards have helped bus operators save money, run more efficiently, improve safety before or during the COVID-19 pandemic, streamline operations, improve customer satisfaction, or increase ridership.