CALGARY, AB — February 23, 2010 – Lake Erie Transit (LET), of Monroe County, Michigan, has implemented an ITS solution from Mentor Engineering. Outdated, error-prone manual methods slowed the fixed-route and paratransit service LET provided to its customers and prevented them from expanding. In response to these issues, LET chose a Transit ITS solution to automate scheduling, improve communication, and optimize their service.

For LET’s fixed-route fleet, Mentor Streets® Transit provides Computer-Aided

Dispatch/Automatic Vehicle Location (CAD/AVL) capabilities featuring schedule/route adherence monitoring and reporting. The solution also includes Mentor Ranger® in-vehicle computers and paratransit scheduling software at the back office.

Enhanced driver/dispatcher communication has been the most noticeable improvement at LET. As Rania Alkhouri, Dispatch Manager and Scheduler at LET says: “Dispatchers can send text messages to the drivers easily now using Streets. This means dispatchers don’t have to try to relay information to drivers over the radio.” This increases efficiency and frees dispatcher time for other tasks.

The ability to track buses in real-time has helped LET improve their customer service. “We use Streets all the time in the dispatch office because it can always show you where the bus is. With this knowledge, we can provide more detailed and accurate information for passengers about the location of their bus. This has led to a reduction in customer complaints,” explains Rania.

In the future, LET will use Streets to plan their fixed-route bus schedules and eliminate their manual processes. Says Rania: “The scheduling application will give us more information and more details to help us figure out where we have to move our runs, and which areas we don’t cover where there are people wanting to ride the bus. This will help our ridership numbers go up.”