All of the Coalition member states contain large sections of rural areas that are nevertheless served by public transportation. This project is an effort to extend the significant work of the Coalition in developing real time information in more urban areas (e.g. Safe Trip-21) to its rural constituents. While real time traveler information has had a very significant market penetration in urban areas, rural transit providers have been slower to adopt the technology for a variety of reasons. First, the costs of this technology have been extremely high and have discouraged pursuit of the technology by rural providers. Second, there are questions about the types of real time information, and the mode of delivery, that are most applicable in the rural context. The Coalition’s Vermont Real Time Rural Transit Information project seeks to shed light on both of these questions.

Procurement Agency:  Marylad SHA
Project Contact: Bill Stoeckert

Evaluate low cost methods of deploying a real time transit information system for rural transit providers. Once low cost methods were investigated, the subsequent objective was to deploy the system for a rural transit provider to determine the implementation and ongoing operational costs of the system.

View Scope of Work

This project successfully investigated multiple technologies for delivering real time transit information, and selected specific lower cost technologies for deployment in the Advance Transit (NH/VT) public transit system. A key element of this deployment was the development of software tools that have significantly eased the management burden of this system. The “Real Time System Manager” enables Advance Transit operational staff to quickly and easily manage the overall system, including assigning GPS units to buses and buses to routes. This web-based system also allows Advance Transit to post custom messages to 2 Dynamic Message Signs that have been deployed within the Advance Transit service area. Real time information is also available from the Advance Transit home page at advancetransit.com. Other system features include a call-in Voice Response service.

Deliverables: The project is currently up and running on Advance Transit’s website at advancetransit.com. Advance Transit is operating the system from their on site computer server.

Original Project Budget:$200,000 +$50,000 (local match)
Amended Project Budget:: $220,000

Additional funds were added to support software development for dynamic message signs and improvements to the software when ported to the Advance Transit server.

The total project budget is $250,000:
$200,000 in federal funds from the I-95 Corridor Coalition
$50,000 in local funds and/or in-kind services coming from

1. Dartmouth College ($25,000)
2. Advance Transit ($5,000) 
3. City of Lebanon, NH Planning Board ($20,000)