When you have up to 200 buses on the streets for 23 hours each day, it’s essential to constantly monitor your vehicles to ensure the highest levels of on-time performance and safety. For the Suburban Mobility Authority for Rapid Transit (SMART), that challenge was growing increasingly difficult as its automatic vehicle location (AVL) system aged. The AVL uses a radio network to create a two-way communication link between each vehicle and SMART’s operations center where dispatchers can monitor vehicle locations, schedule performance, and other metrics. “Our AVL was 20 years old,” explained Mel Evans, IT manager for SMART. “We were relying on a legacy analog radio network that used three leased towers and a slice of frequency that was being retired. While this infrastructure was satisfactory 20 years ago, it wasn’t keeping pace with SMART. We wanted more reporting and we wanted real-time information that we could share with our public ridership.” One option was to upgrade from analog to digital signals and increase the number of towers. Evans noted that this would be cost-prohibitive. “At approximately $1 million each, the upgrade strategy was too expensive for our agency,” he said. “It became clearer that we needed to consider a different strategy that involved an entirely new AVL solution.”

Mowic saw an opportunity to reduce the operating costs of spreading salt on roads. Not knowing what terrain you’ll face affects traffic patterns, wears down brake systems, and most importantly is very dangerous. In addition to added time and danger on the roads, it’s no small cost to municipalities to run trucks for salt distribution.