In 2015, a widely publicized electrical malfunction on a Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Metro) line killed a commuter and injured more than 80 others. The incident drew overdue national attention to the city’s aging and underfunded infrastructure. In March of this year, the Metro again made headlines when Metro leadership abruptly shut the system down midweek for 29 hours of emergency inspections and repairs. Now, Metro is warning citizens of months-long Metro line closures for renovations. This is not an isolated incident, and the agency is not alone in its struggle to achieve a state of good repair amid fiscal constraints.
According to the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), more than 40 percent of the nation’s buses and 25 percent of its rail transit assets are in marginal or poor condition. Additionally, backlogged maintenance and replacement needs come at an estimated cost of $86 billion. Because transit users constitute a small subset of the U.S. population, the federal government is hard-pressed to pour money into transit-related infrastructure.
The FTA, however, is not turning a blind eye to this ongoing crisis. In fact, it now requires transit agencies to monitor and report on the condition of their capital assets in order to receive funding, making rigorous asset management more critical than ever. Fortunately, there are new asset management software tools available to assist transportation agencies in complying and obtaining the necessary ammunition to justify additional funding.
Asset Management Tools
Legacy asset management software systems are intended to provide an overview of the current and future condition of assets for planning and decision-making, but they don’t necessarily do the job. Some tools are proprietary and costly, while others are too detailed or focus on maintenance activities, treating capital planning as an afterthought. Some older federal tools are built using Microsoft Excel or Access, which are inefficient and inadequate platforms for such an important enterprise software application.
There is a solution however. A new breed of federally funded, open source asset management tools are coming online now. Open source systems are, by definition, freely available for use without any license fees, and can be easily modified to meet each agency’s needs. As web-based tools, they bring a new granular view of transit assets — vehicle by vehicle, farebox by farebox when needed — for more accurate management. Agencies can immediately see the amount of capital needed to maintain, rehabilitate or replace assets over any time frame. With this data on hand, they can better predict the funds needed to maintain a state of good repair and develop projects over a longer-term planning horizon. The federal government funded these tools for this exact type of use.
Pennsylvania’s New Capital Planning Tool
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) is taking advantage of these new tools to manage the state’s annual $1.5 billion investment in public transportation. The PA Bureau of Public Transportation has already rolled out Phase One of its Capital Planning Tool (CPT), a customized version of the TransAM open source asset management platform. Division Chief Elizabeth Bonini is not only actively involved in the system development and implementation, she is one of its chief beneficiaries.
“Before CPT, we received asset lists from different agencies in Excel or Access format and had to compile them all and it was extremely difficult,” said Bonini. “Now the agencies themselves have entered all of their assets in the system and are required to keep them up to date.” The transit agencies can now start developing their capital state of good repair plans, which are initially developed on an estimated service life policy-based scenario. However, added Bonini, “transit agency staff might inspect a vehicle and conclude it can safely run for another year. With CPT, they can just drag and drop that vehicle into the next fiscal year, pushing out its replacement date and cost based on true needs.” With a statewide view of transit assets, Bonini and the transit agencies throughout Pennsylvania can more accurately plan for future capital needs and funding.
When the rollout is complete, Bonini will also rely on CPT for long-range capital planning. “Once CPT is fully implemented,” explained Bonini, “we will have better overall state of good repair data, which will allow us to provide transit agencies with multi-year funding commitments that can be programmed on the State Transportation Improvement Program. We couldn’t always do this before because we were only seeing bits and pieces of the statewide picture.” Bonini pointed out multi-year commitments will enable agencies to order assets in advance, such as buses which could take up to two years to receive.
Bonini also champions CPT in presentations to other state transportation departments. “Because the system is open source, we can freely share our modifications with other government agencies and vice versa,” stated Bonini. “With everyone on board, we can pool our system enhancements for free, saving a tremendous number of man-hours and payroll costs.”
Open Source Benefits
Open source systems bring other benefits: there are no license fees, each agency is free to customize the software as needed, and as noted above, changes and updates can be freely shared with other agencies. Systems can be rolled out by in-house staff, or with assistance from a competitive market of vendors and cloud computing providers. TransAM is one of several open source platforms that are becoming widely adopted among the transit community, along with OpenTripPlanner (trip planning), OneBusAway (real-time transit information), and the VTCLI-funded 1-Click mobility platform.
Surviving Fiscal Constraints
A staggering $19.2 trillion national debt coupled with state and city budget crises do not bode well for more generous transit appropriations anytime soon. Yet, the nation’s transit systems are vital not only to the commuter population but to the economic growth of urban centers and the nation as a whole.
These new federally funded asset management tools are a boon to underfunded transportation agencies. The tools themselves combine greater asset control with more intelligent, justifiable capital planning. They can be rolled out quickly and inexpensively, often without a complex procurement process. Most importantly, transit agencies can easily maintain the information required to justify their capital needs, while funding entities can have more confidence that these needs are legitimate, showing accountability to the public and supervisory bodies. With broad use of these tools, achieving a state of good repair for our infrastructure despite fiscal shortfalls will be more readily within our reach.
Eric Ziering is executive vice president, CS Software, for Cambridge Systematics.
