Business View Civil and Municipal | Volume 2, Issue 6

28 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 2, ISSUE 6 list for coming changes. “Avail is a great partner to have because of how easy they make our jobs with reliable data coming from a singular source, but they’re currently based on our server and that’s been a hurdle throughout the pandemic when we wanted to have people work remotely,” she admits. “But they’re now making that transition to a fully SaaS model, and we’re hoping to make it with them soon. If, God forbid, we had another event like this, we could easily send people home without worrying about security risks to our server.” Finally, Valley Transit has entered into strategic planning surrounding potential implementation of the recommendations coming out of their COA. “One of the items suggested was to run a pilot project on being fare free all the time,” Peters explains. “Several transits have done it successfully and it’s led to quite an increase in their ridership. It might be something that’s worth pursuing here, but we are still early in the processes of making a determination on if it is the best fit for our community and our budget. I’d also like us to take the data that we’ve collected, an unexpected benefit of the pandemic, to determine what our essential routes are. Then we could really be responsive to what the community is telling us that we need.” Over the next five years, Peters hopes to see Valley Transit some way down the line on making that full transition to EV on their Fixed Route suite. She admits, “We were hesitant when we first brought in the electric buses. We didn’t know if they were going to be very effective given some of the horror stories we’d heard from other agencies. Luckily, that’s not been our experience.” Moving over to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model with their current enterprise provider Avail Technologies, designed specifically for use in the transit industry, is also on Peters’ wish PREFERRED VENDORS/ PARTNERS n BYD en.byd.com BYD is the world’s leading battery-electric bus manufacturer with over 50,000 vehicles on the road globally and over 1,000 vehicles on the road or in production in the United States. BYD is creating hundreds of American jobs, making battery-electric buses that help clean our air while improving efficiency and the bottom line for our customers. n Infojini www.infojiniconsulting.com