Today we had a customer who was reporting issues on one of their routes. We took the support ticket and were able to resolve the issue fairly quickly, but as part of the support process, we also did a quick review of their logs.

BusWhere has a unique system of green-yellow-red to provide a quick “good/bad” visual evaluation of route logs. This means that by going to the Logs tab on the admin portal, administrators can see the outcomes of dozens of routes at a glance. Any yellow or red is accompanied by a number reflecting the number and types of issues detected for quick details on demand.

This represents a visual summary of hundreds of thousands of data points, hours of cumulative automated analysis, and screenfuls of data that the user would otherwise have to sort through to extract a meaningful picture.

What this meant for this customer is that a quick glance at the logs tab told us that too many of their routes were yellow, clearly not a good experience for their riders. Rolling the mouse down the “colors” column and hovering over the larger numbers showed some patterns, for example: A particular route was repeatedly showing stops arriving out of order.

BusWhere has a solution for this as well. This can happen if a bus drives by Stop 9 on its way to Stop 2 — Stop 9 could get flagged as “arrived”, incorrectly. This can be quickly and easily addressed, and following that adjustment, future logs showed green, green green. Coming back to the logs tab later that day we saw a thread of greens down the left column where the previous day was yellow.

Bus tracking and logistics is complicated, with lots of things that can go wrong. We have always been committed to finding creative ways to make problems jump out and be immediately obvious and quickly fixable, and this is just one example of tools that we provide to all our customers to enable this kind of quick analysis.

We are excited for our new reporting and visualization tools, coming soon…