Easy as APC: ENGIE Solutions Offers Real-Time Occupancy Data

After a period of unprecedented confinement, ensuring the safety of workers—no longer able to work remotely—in public transport is at the heart of concerns. At a time of progressive deconfinement, social distancing has become the norm in the public space and tends to become so in public transport. To contribute to the collective effort, ENGIE Solutions is committed to participate in reviving lifestyle habits in the best conditions.

To meet this new requirement, ENGIE Solutions is supporting Public Transit agencies in managing social distancing within their vehicles, and offering its Automatic Passenger Counting (APC) as a way for transit operations to monitor the ridership in their fleet, in real-time. The APC module provides critical information and notifications about the current number of passengers in vehicles in real-time, which is pivotal to make social distancing respected.

Like never before, agencies need accurate and real-time ridership data to dynamically plan and adapt their everyday services. Using passenger-counting data coming out of a bus or train fleet, agencies can analyze current ridership and trend per route, stop or time of day, and optimize vehicle utilization and schedule to the current reality.

In addition, real-time occupancy status is made available to riders on agencies’ mobile app via the real-time standard GTFS-RT, so they can visualize if the next vehicle arriving is full or not, and respect social distancing. ENGIE Solutions aims to allow passengers to avoid crowds, travel in a safe environment and regain confidence into public transportation.

“Today, public transport infrastructures are more than ever integrated into our daily lives,” ENGIE Solutions said in a press release. “The challenge is to make public transport more fluid and connected by improving the passenger experience while meeting the needs of operators. Attractiveness and energy efficiency, but also seamless travel and passenger safety are all imperatives that must be met. For several years, ENGIE Solutions has innovated to offer smarter, greener and safer mobility. Faced with the health crisis we are going through, being able to move around safely has become a real challenge that cannot be met without guarantees of quality and safety. To contribute to the collective effort, ENGIE Solutions is committed to participate in reviving lifestyle habits in the best conditions.”