Sound Transit

The Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority – better known as Sound Transit – was created by the Washington State legislature in 1993. Sound Transit plans, builds, and operates a regional mass transit system that connects people to their communities and jobs throughout urban areas of King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties. They have grown from a planning agency to one that carried 34.7 million passengers in 2015, to 47.0 million passengers in 2017 on their trains and buses. Ridership forecast for 2020’s is 60-70 million. Demand for Sound Transit services continues to grow year-over year, evidenced by the 2016 Sound Transit 3 (ST3) voter initiative to more than double the size of its light rail service, while adding additional capacity on other modes.

Sound Transit monitors industry standard operational performance metrics for each mode of service. The Operations department uses modal performance data in four main ways:

• To make data driven business decisions in order to provide high quality service to our customers
• To share with the public and respond to public information requests
• To oversee and monitor partner agreements
• To submit standardized metrics monthly and annually to the National Transit Database (NTD), which is a requirement of transit agencies that receive federal funding.

The OPR project goal is to modernize enterprise reporting capabilities, moving away from siloed, hard to support products and towards enterprise, scalable solutions.

Results and Value

Estrada Consulting’s consultant team helped streamline and improve the way operational performance data is collected, stored, analyzed, and shared. Specifically, the project accomplished the following:

• Delivered a single solution (Enterprise Data Warehouse) with capabilities to consolidated reporting for all modes with benefits of a consistent user experience, using consistent tools and techniques (note: as of 9/21, Link mode is in production, with other modes planned in 2022)
• Provided a foundation upon which reporting for future modes can be incorporated in a consistent fashion.
• Conducted detailed process/data analysis of legacy system (TimeExtender) for business rule validation/documentation.
• Conducted data migration/data analysis against various source system data (TimeExtender, Hastus, SCADA, EAMS, etc.).
• Replaced the legacy TimeExtender based Link Reporting solution with modern SQL Server/SSIS/PowerBI based solution.