Delivering information to passengers is a critical element of public outreach for transit agencies. Remix Transit makes this straightforward for agencies with our newest feature, Presentation Studio. Remix’s Presentation Studio turns your transit projects into public-facing materials by providing additional polish and high resolution visuals. With a few keystrokes, you can quickly customize Remix maps to clearly communicate critical information to the community like route adjustments, detours, and other service changes.
For Skagit Transit, a small suburban agency in Washington State, Presentation Studio delivers a faster, easier way to create readable service maps. According to Brad Windler, the agency’s planning and outreach supervisor, the high-resolution maps generated with Presentation Studio have streamlined the agency’s production of rider guides—a task that wasn’t so simple before Remix.
Skagit Transit produces service guides as a standard component of community outreach. Before Remix stepped in, however, the creation process was unnecessarily complicated.
“[We did it] haphazardly, at best,” Windler reported, describing their original system. The agency used to collect map information from Google and edit by hand using Adobe and similar software with mixed results. The process was time-consuming for Brad, who wears many hats as the service planner at a small agency.
With Remix’s Presentation Studio, Windler and his team can now download a high-quality map for every route Skagit Transit serves and easily add information like destinations, route origins, and compass directions. Once the maps are marked up properly, they are ready for printing.
Previously, Windler and his team were already using Remix to obtain critical community planning information including:
The team sees Presentation Studio as “a natural fit” for their workflow in Remix.
With Skagit Transit using Remix’s Presentation Studio on a regular basis, the difference is noticeable. The agency’s community advisory committee, a group of riders that Skagit Transit regularly gathers feedback from, has praised the maps, particularly their clarity. “Remix maps with Presentation Studio are much crisper images than what we’ve used in the past,” Windler reports.
The Skagit team has also noticed the difference. Instead of cobbling together maps with multiple tools that happen to be available, they’re using software specifically designed for the task. “It’s saved us dozens of work hours,” says Windler. “I remember coming up with maps before, and it was weeks of work! To be able to produce a map that has the street grid and our routing on it was a tremendous savings in both time and money.”
Overall, Skagit Transit has saved at least 40 staff hours per project using Remix.
Skagit Transit pairs Presentation Studio with demographic analysis made easy by Remix’s default and custom data layers. Planners no longer need to navigate the complexity of GIS systems to show where riders are and what they need to get around.
Windler recently presented Remix maps to his board of directors, made up mostly of local government leaders, to illustrate how Skagit Transit provides quality service to seniors and people with disabilities. “It’s given them a comfort level that our services are oriented towards exactly who they’re supposed to serve,” Windler says.
We’d be happy to set that up. Visit remix.com/demo to see how it works.
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