Transportation

You build the nation's transportation infrastructure.

We help you make better market decisions with data.

Essential Citizen Services for Urban Mobility

The public expects reliable, safe public transit options. Your business helps plan, design, and construct mass transit infrastructure, as well as the streets, highways, and bridges that make individual transportation possible.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted mass transit operations, it is time to think ahead about the future of transit operations, and how you can match your goods and services to public agency demand.

Key concerns discussed among transit authorities include:

• Operational adaptations in a post-COVID world, including rider density and operating hours
• Capital and operating budget modifications adjusting to budget shortfalls - Risk management for the riding public
• Transit system resiliency for severe weather events
• Electrification opportunities supporting broader municipal and state-level climate goals
• Social justice and policing considerations
• Improved use of real-time information management systems to enhance all of the above

Proactive service providers are keeping the pulse of changes in this dynamic industry.

By serving up data data in a ready-to-use business intelligence we empower you to have trusted advisor conversations and efficiently develop business.

US Transit Market: What Information Matters

You need insight to enable the right sales conversations and marketing investments. We provide dashboards containing current data, configured to your business, so you have fast accurate answers. This includes:

Operational Details: Nation-wide, operating parameters for authorities running bus, train, ferry, and road-based transit systems.

Real-Time Conversations: What are the hot topics being discussed in board meetings?

Capital Improvement Plans: CIPs are used by public organizations to forecast 3 - 8 year capital costs, funding, and timing for large projects. We carefully review 100,000s of pages of CIPs from large municipal governments and transit authorities, curating data on 10,000s of municipal projects.

Partnerships: Knowing the influencers matters, including city leaders and their strategic partners for service delivery. Our data can help prime contractors find the best subs, and visa-versa.

The point is to reach and influence market opportunities, before the RFP.  See our blog post about RFPs here.

We curate data, from 100s of sources, so that your team doesn't need to. Your business developers can spend the time on customer relationships rather than data curation and analysis.

You access, live, navigable data to answer important questions quickly, and with confidence.

Our customers want to avoid the pain of being surprised.

Decisions on transit don't happen overnight. There are months or years of capital planning involved. If you plan ahead, you can anticipate and engage future opportunities, long ahead of receiving that dreaded cold RFP.

Our customers don't hate RFPs, they hate cold RFPs. The ones that they could have influenced, where the potential client did not take the best strategic approach to the market.

The only way to avoid the pain of a surprise RFP, or even worse, being left out of consideration is to have good business intelligence on the market.

This market presents unique challenges and opportunities. As with most things worthwhile, mastering it is not easy. A successful approach to the many U.S. transit market requires an intelligent, patient, and strategic approach.

First, know that the sales cycle can be lengthy. Making the first sale to a brand new customer can be difficult. Then after you are established, your footprint can be challenged by competitive re-bidding requirements. You may be the first into an account, but find yourself in a crowd as procurement sources multiple bids.

Next, if you are selling novel new approaches and technologies, know that transit authorities aren’t always early adopters and are very conservative in their selection of new technologies. Risk taking is often not rewarded. Change does happen but tends to happen slowly, as keeping the trains moving, the roads intact, are the first priority.

Finally, you’ll know from news headlines that budgetary needs are often not fully funded. Necessary capital investments seem to be continually delayed. The ASCE published America's Infrastructure score as a D+, in their 2017 “Making the Grade” report. Transit received a "D-", and along the same lines, Ports received a "D", Roads a "D", Rail a "B", and Aviation a "D".

In some ways, our utility infrastructure is like a home with too much deferred maintenance. There comes a time when your foot goes thru the decking, the pipe bursts and floods the basement, and a higher bill comes due. That is the case today with critical U.S. transit services.

Why You Hate Cold RFPs

Cold RFPs: Know Where the Puck is Going