Another item that makes Avail unique within the ITS for transit industry is that we are not only a product provider, but we have a long successful history of providing a wide range of engineering services as well.
For years the industry has been broken down into product providers and technology consultants. If you were a product provider that meant that you would only market, sell and support your own line of ITS products. If you were strictly a consultant that meant that you would work with transit properties to provide a wide range of consulting services that could include everything from evaluating a properties need for technology and then helping them to procure that technology, to analyzing route structures and helping to create new service levels.
However, the paths of these two entities seldom ever crossed because a product provider didn’t want to work with other vendor’s products unless their product was involved in the project, and consultants didn’t want to become experts on the use and operation of any one particular product over another because they didn’t want to be seen as having favoritism towards a particular vendor.
Avail isn’t saying that these models are wrong, but today as more and more products become available off-the-shelf and transit properties are able to take advantage of open architecture non-propriety design, the need for someone to span the gap has become increasingly evident.
Since 1992, the staff of Avail has worked with virtually every ITS technology provider for public transit within North America. During this time we have also worked with dozens if not hundreds of transit properties to help them adopt and integrate technology from each of these vendors. If you couple these facts with Avail’s concept of nonproprietary system design and our proven willingness to incorporate technology from any vendor regardless if our products are included or not, then Avail has much more to offer the transit industry than just state of the art products.
Avail has a long successful history of providing a wide range of engineering services to the fixed route, paratransit and mixed fleet transit operators across the country. The services we provided have ranged from needs assessment and product procurement, to project management and system design. Many times these projects have included Avail working with a multitude of vendors providing an array of technologies (none of which were Avail’s) to incorporating our own products and then providing operational consulting on how to make the best use of our products in conjunction with another vendors products.
The bottom line is that Avail was formed to be an engineering resource as well as a solutions provider to our target transit operators and as such we realize that the needs of a property aren’t only buying new system, sometime its simply learning how to make better use of the system you already have.
To learn more about these services and see some of the properties that have benefited from them, please see the sections that follow.
Avail is not only willing and able to provide your fixed route transit property with the engineering resources you need to make better use of the technologies you already have, but we have along successful history of doing so. To read about a few of the projects where Avail has provided these types of services please see the project profiles below.
- Electronic Fare Collection Systems - we have led procurements of farebox installations, trained properties to extract the most data from their electronic fare collection system, and making firmware changes to embedded software operating in farebox system to improve it’s operation
- In-vehicle Security Camera Systems
- Computer Aided Dispatching Systems
- Data Communications Systems
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Avail has helped numerous paratransit operators assess their operational needs and to select the right mix of new technologies and changes to operational procedures that maximized operational effectiveness. The result of Avail’s efforts in this area has not only been a long list of satisfied customers, but the evolution of a whole new concept for doing product procurement referred to as the “1-2-3 Approach”. This approach was originally conceived by Avail in 1999 to address the needs of one of our customers (Battle Creek, MI), and has now evolved into an industry standard that is being widely used by consultants and transit properties alike. To hear more about Avail’s achievement in this area please read the project profiles below.
- Computer Aided Reservation, Scheduling, and Dispatching Systems
- In-vehicle Security Camera Systems
- Data Communications Systems
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