Long Beach Transit Automates Service Change Process 

Background 

Long Beach Transit (LBT) keeps southeastern Los Angeles County and northwestern Orange County moving, serving more than 18 million riders each year. Covering over 100 square miles across 14 cities, LBT operates 250 buses on fixed routes, logging over 6.7 million service miles and 670,000 service hours annually. Beyond buses, LBT also provides water taxis and on-demand paratransit services, ensuring the region stays connected in multiple ways. 

Challenge 

Three times a year, LBT undertakes one of its most critical operational efforts: a service change. During a service change, adjustments are made to route alignments, schedules, bus stop locations and resources. For LBT staff, this meant hours of manual work, requiring significant updates to both data and maps. It was a time-consuming, multi-step process.  

Two tasks stood out as especially time-consuming and error-prone: uploading operator bid documents and updating running boards. Bid documents outline the available driving assignments, allowing operators to choose their routes and schedules when a new service plan begins. A running board is the detailed schedule that translates planned routes into daily bus movements and driver assignments. 

Uploading bid documents and running boards could take several hours. Updating duty lists alone required 20–30 minutes per cycle and had to be repeated multiple times a day for a week.  

Technical Solution 

Quartic worked with LBT to embed standardized, repeatable automation tools directly into ArcGIS Pro, allowing staff to remain within familiar software while dramatically reducing manual steps. Each tool aligns with a specific step in the service change process, saving countless hours. 

All scripts were embedded in custom geoprocessing tools in ArcGIS Pro, allowing GIS staff to work within familiar software.  

Each tool in the automation toolbox aligns with a specific step in LBT’s service change process, helping GIS staff handle tasks faster and more accurately. 

Having standardized, repeatable tools embedded in ArcGIS Pro is extremely valuable. These custom geoprocessing script tools are more user-friendly than standalone Python scripts, allowing users to define parameters easily. They also include metadata and validation rules, which improve usability, reduce training time, and ensure consistency.

Brendan Schultheis
GIS/ITS transit planner for Long Beach Transit 

Preparing GTFS Data 

• Processes exported GTFS files from Hastus, LBT’s scheduling system
• Performs common data corrections  
• Incorporates static files from previous service changes 
• Organizes versions of each export to ensure nothing is accidentally overwritten  

Comparing Service Changes and Stop Sequences 

• Generates a clear comparison between the previous and new service change
• Highlights added or removed stops and routes, sign changes, and stop sequences. This gives planners an easy-to-read summary of what has changed  

Bus Stop Dataset Update 

A complete collection of active/inactive bust stops are kept in a central “production” database used for maps, planning, and online tools. This tool: 

• Generates a new, quality-checked dataset for new and existing stops that is then reviewed by GIS staff 
• Updates the production database with the new dataset approved by GIS staff 
• Correctly calculates location coordinates and other spatial details 

Managing Duty Lists 

LBT’s Operators Hub is now an ArcGIS Hub site with a page for bus operators to bid for schedules before a service change. The new tool manages both addition new documents and updating existing ones. GIS staff only need to indicate where the documents to upload are stored and whether the documents are for pre-bid, bid, or relief bid periods. 

Splitting and Uploading Vehicle Schedules 

LBT has vehicle schedules for weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. When the transit planning department provides GIS staff with vehicle schedules, the schedules are compiled into a single PDF. These PDFs need to be split into individual files and added as records to the hosted table that supports the Operators Hub. This tool: 

• Splits multi-page PDFs into individual PDFs 
• Renames the PDFs according to a secondary XLS file with their unique names 
• Organizes them into folders by day type 

A second tool takes these folders and inserts a record into the Operators Hub table for every PDF generated by the split process, with each record getting a unique URL locating the PDF on the web server. 

Software/Technology 

Results 

Together, these automated tools significantly streamline LBT’s service change process, saving hours per service change. Automation has allowed staff to focus on higher-value work like reviewing reliability data, evaluating service performance, and improving customer-facing products. 

The ROI has been excellent and measurable. Automation has saved significant staff time, reduced errors, and improved data accuracy. Given how often service changes occur at LBT, the cumulative impact is significant, making it a highly worthwhile investment.

-Brendan Schultheis