![]() This series of meetings, conducted over a week, also included a team from Esri which assisted with the discovery sessions. Not only did the GIS team gain a greater understanding of all the various business groups within the agency, but the different teams within Valley Metro became more aware of what GIS could do, and the data potential held within GIS. ![]() Showing people the data behind maps and dashboards, and the analyses and outcomes possible, proved to be of great mutual benefit. The first big hurdle was to convince people that GIS is about more than ‘just’ maps, he says. To gauge true need, and the potential for use beyond planning applications, the GIS team, which is headed by Joe Gregory, put together a slide deck and then presented it to the organization’s various departments. The watershed came two years ago when Valley Metro’s GIS team wanted to look at their current and future software needs over a several year period. More modern developments have resulted in a series of apps and dashboards which have made themselves indispensable in terms of planning and operations, and which have set trends and gained national recognition. That had the initial benefit of bringing location information into a functional database and gave some idea of GIS’s potential. Valley Metro’s experience in GIS stretches back over a decade when it was first used in support of an application which has since been retired: providing mapping data for biannual printed updates of service changes. The agency covers an area of 500 square miles and with more than 100 bus routes and a light rail line that serves 19 cities, geared to providing a high-quality, efficient and well-regarded service to a regional population of almost five million and a ridership which totals almost 66 million annually. ![]() The agency is unique in that a number of services are actually funded and operated by the individual cities, while all services come together to create Valley Metro as a common brand and a common face to the region’s transit customers. Valley Metro operates as the umbrella public transit organization for the City of Phoenix and its greater metropolitan area, providing bus, light rail, paratransit and ride-share services. Beyond traditional uses for GIS-such as route planning, ridership, and equity analyses-the agency is implementing GIS for its safety program, to provide support for local businesses during construction, and to help with the pandemic's costs post-COVID-19 economic recovery. At Arizona's Valley Metro Regional Public Transportation Authority, which provides coordinated transit services to residents of metro Phoenix, decision-makers rely on geographic information system (GIS) technology in a growing list of business areas.
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