To support achieving its strategic goals, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA) is taking advantage of the most recent advancements in HASTUS by upgrading its HASTUS modules for scheduling and operations, adding the NetPlan module, and moving RTA’s HASTUS installation to the cloud by adopting GIRO’s turnkey hosted solution.

RTA chose GIRO's hosted option for its upgraded HASTUS installation to reduce risks and enjoy increased benefits in the form of an effective, reliable disaster-recovery program, efficient upgrades, and 24/7 support. As many agencies are experiencing staffing pressures, the hosted HASTUS installation relieves RTA of the burden of assigning resources to maintaining the servers required for the previous on-premises installation and ensuring that they were upgraded in a timely manner.

“This HASTUS upgrade provides RTA with new opportunities in our scheduling and service-planning areas. We are especially excited about the possibilities of NetPlan, which will allow our team to build models and see how proposed changes will impact important metrics such as our customers’ travel times, vehicle frequency, and more,” said Michael Lively, Manager – Intelligent Transportation Systems, of RTA.

“GIRO is committed to continuing to support RTA with the best software tools to help meet their strategic goals,” said Robert Victor, GIRO’s Vice President, Public Transit Software for the North American and Australian markets. “We value the collaboration that we have enjoyed with RTA since 1989. We are confident that NetPlan will play a key role in defining the future of transit in Greater Cleveland.”

The 10-year strategic plan adopted by RTA in 2020 calls for the agency to lead in its integration of new technologies and to continue to demonstrate its customer focus through various planning initiatives. The agency has identified a recently completed fare-equity study and the coming selection of a new fare-collection method as examples of initiatives for which it expects to use NetPlan to full advantage. RTA also expects NetPlan to enable its planning and scheduling teams to adapt quickly and effectively to changes in travel patterns and the ridership profile that may occur in the recovery phase from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (RTA) provides a variety of transportation services, typically for 150,000–200,000 customers on a weekday or about 45 million rides annually, across 457 square miles of the Greater Cleveland Region in Ohio, USA. RTA strives to deliver access to opportunity for individuals and the entire region through safe, reliable, integrated, sustainable, and innovative transportation. The trips provided by RTA amount to nearly 50 percent of all public transit trips in Ohio.