247 Labs designed, created, and launched a complete taxi scheduling application for Co-op Cabs and the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) to help schedule over 20,000 weekly trips.

Associated Toronto Taxi-Cab Co-operative Limited (ATTCL) is a taxi co-operative that includes several ground transportation brands serving Toronto and the surrounding Greater Toronto Area. It also provides contracted services that fulfil rider requests for people in the vulnerable sector, and it assigns a large share of its operators to those contracted rides every day.

Each day ATTCL received rider requests in bulk, in PDF and text formats. Individual schedules were then built by hand and distributed to operators by email, fax or upload to an Android tablet.

• Schedulers printed all run sheets, sorted them into piles by time slot, and matched trips by hand until each driver had enough trips for the allocated kilometres and shift end.
• Dispatchers uploaded run sheets into an Excel sheet each morning and phoned each driver to confirm receipt of the schedule.
• Drivers handed in paper run sheets and printed receipts at the end of the week.

The result was a large amount of manual work to coordinate 1,000 to 2,000 taxi rides a day, a human-resource-intensive process with room for error and little statistics or tracking.

247 Labs built a web-based portal, called the ATTCL core, that processes bulk PDF requests for ATTCL’s TTC multi-passenger, multi-drop-off ride service, handling 1,000 to 2,000 requests a day and producing schedules that can be shared across a network of taxi drivers in the GTA.

• Kilometre allocation. A daily maximum number of kilometres per operator, with manual override and a weekly-to-date calculation compared to a weekly goal.
• Trip clustering. Group trips by distance between orders to minimise distance travelled by the operator.
• Vehicle matching. Requests are matched to available vehicle types, from sedans to accessible side- or rear-door loader vans.
• Operator suspensions. No trips issued to a suspended operator, with suspension history reports.

The software has drastically improved the ability for TTC riders to book a taxi, and for the TTC to manage their taxi fees.

A site visit with ATTCL schedulers captured the current process, turning scheduler and dispatcher routines into software requirements. Delivery ran as Agile Scrum in weekly sprints with a demo meeting at the end of each sprint. The project proceeded through five phases: