Since taking new ownership in 2019 with nine drivers, one office employee, and one mechanic, Michigan-based charter and tour company, National Trails, has seen tremendous growth. In the last three years alone, the company has more than tripled the number of employees, doubled its school bus fleet and increased its motorcoach fleet size by 15. “During this period of rapid growth, we have been incredibly reliant on our software,” said Austin Arksey, owner of National Trails. “If we didn’t have software like busHive, we would not have been able to scale as easily and as efficiently as we have.” According to Arksey, when he purchased National Trails in 2019, charters were managed via handwritten or typewritten messages being physically handed to drivers. One of the first initiatives the company undertook was digitizing these many processes, and that meant migrating the manual charter-booking into busHive. busHive provides cloud-based software to streamline workflows and recordkeeping across the entire charter process – from the initial quote to confirmations, contracts, generating driver itineraries, billing, and invoicing. National Trails uses the software to manage its sales, billing, and payroll – with reporting that shows revenue per vehicle, profit/loss analysis, and other important benchmarking tools. “As we are continuing to add additional fleet, busHive has been very instrumental in giving us the keys to have visibility to being able to see our trips on a daily, weekly, monthly, even annual basis as well,” Arksey said. “It has been very helpful to have solid software in place as we continue to grow.” However, rapid scalability often comes with its own set of challenges as National Trails well knows. With the accelerated addition of employees, Arksey said that ensuring new hires are fully trained and brought up to speed on how the company functions and operates has been one of the biggest challenges thus far. “As we’ve been hiring people, some of the things that we look at are people’s adaptability, are they quick learners, especially when it comes to working with software and technology,” Arksey said. “We are not looking at people that can solve and handle the challenges that we have just today, that can help us solve the challenges we have tomorrow and beyond.” Arksey said that busHive has been instrumental in helping National Trails keep track of driver credentials and expiring licenses. The driver management tool has also enabled the company to maintain certifications without having any lapse in downtime for drivers. With the influx of new coaches and new business, preventive maintenance (PM) is always a primary concern. With more buses in the fleet, National Trails has continued to prioritize preventative maintenance on all its equipment. All work orders are loaded into busHive, allowing the company to ensure that PM orders process correctly and that inventory is properly maintained. “With the busHive software, we transitioned our techs from doing work orders on paper to doing them on tablets so we could reduce the amount of time that it took for those work orders to get into our system and have quicker visibility to be able to make decisions on equipment,” Arksey said. “Our downtime was reduced, and we were able to better manage, monitor and maintain our preventative maintenance schedules.” Arksey said he and his team feel extremely comfortable utilizing the busHive charter system as National Trails continues to grow, citing the great support network which the company provides. “The busHive team has been great,” Arksey said. “In the many years we have been working with busHive we have not faced any outages. Anytime we have suggestions their team is always receptive to changes and interested in learning about new ideas. It has been a great partnership and experience.”

  By Ryan Harshbarger As retirements and turnover accelerate, agencies are increasingly measuring workforce health by a single number: how long it takes a new hire to reach full productivity. Transit agencies across the country are watching an unusually large share of their operator workforce approach retirement while turnover among newer hires remains high. Recruiting is often the easier problem: agencies can typically keep the hiring pipeline filled. The harder problem is what happens after that. How many of those new hires stick around? How quickly will the ones who stay reach full productivity behind the wheel? APTA has named workforce shortages among the industry’s leading priorities. For operations leaders, the practical question is readiness: once someone is hired, how much time and support does it take before they can safely and confidently run a full day of revenue service. From system training to mission training Historically, becoming a confident operator was achieved through a combination of classroom and on the road training over one to three months.  Public transportation by design is operating during rush hours and in some of the highest pedestrian areas of your community, so learning how to safely handle a transit bus in this environment is priority one.  The Avail operator experience is designed to keep focus on the road and on your passengers by handling all the technology on the bus from a single platform, leveraging our Single Sign On MDT. myAvail’s operator console consolidates all of the bus technology for the operator: one login carries an operator through the mobile data terminal (MDT), farebox, headsign, ADA announcements and radio tools they need over a shift, rather than separate credentials and processes for each. For a new hire, that removes a real barrier to entry: training time goes toward service, safety, and customer interaction instead of relearning how to access information the operator already needs. The payoff is lowering how much an operator must hold in their head before they’re comfortable, which shortens the distance between hire date and full productivity. Navigation brings confidence to new operators Once an operator is confident controlling the transit bus, they turn their attention to route familiarization.  This has traditionally depended on paper guides, ride-alongs, and repeated practice runs, methods that remain useful but scale slowly against a hiring pipeline agencies need to fill quickly. Real-time route and detour guidance, delivered directly on the operator’s screen, gives new hires a resource that doesn’t depend on memory built up over months on the same assignment. Avail’s Route and Detour Adherence tools work this way. The route trace, the vehicle’s live position, and turn-by-turn guidance appear on the operator’s MDT and are audibly announced, so an operator’s first day on a route can look closer to their hundredth. When dispatch builds a detour, the system confirms the path is passable for the vehicle, then pushes the detour automatically, with turn prompts, to every affected route before the operator reaches it. For a new hire in particular, that’s a meaningful difference: the operator has guidance in front of them the first time they encounter a detour, not the fifth. The same tool helps experienced operators as well: when a shortage means someone needs to cover a route outside their normal assignment, turn-by-turn guidance lets them run it with the same confidence as a route they know well. One system for the whole operation Operators are the most visible part of getting a new hire to full productivity, but the rest of the operation runs on the same underlying system. myAvail ETMS brings operations, maintenance, finance, and administration together in one platform, so dispatch and maintenance teams are working from the same live data as the operator on the road.  When there is a service disruption the platform is designed to share that information with your team and your customers.  If a bus breaks down along the route, a dispatcher alert your customer service team and riders using public messages, initiate a work order for the maintenance team and log the missed miles and hours for the compliance department, all from a single point in myAvail. When an agency needs something beyond that core, Avail 360, Avail’s API integration layer, connects it in, so the platform can be built out to match how that agency actually runs. Where this points In a labor market where the hiring pipeline is often the easier problem to solve, the most useful measure of a platform is how quickly it gets a new operator to full productivity and confidence. Training an operator inside the same system the rest of the operation runs on gets them there faster than treating the console as its own island, and Avail’s team will be demonstrating the latest MDT and route adherence interface at APTA Expo in Chicago this October, Booth 643. Ryan Harshbarger serves as VP of Product for Avail Technologies. Visit www.availtec.com for more information/