WMATA Case Study

How did they become clients?

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) operates the second largest rail transit system and the fifth largest bus network in the United States. With so many routes, vehicles and timetables under their control, they needed an easy way for people to find the most convenient bus and train routes between any two points.
In order to accomplish this, they implemented a Trip Planner on their website, which allows users to input a travel destination and a place of departure. The Trip Planner will then generate the most convenient itineraries to reach that destination, consisting of a series of buses and/or trains along with walking directions, if necessary, at the end points.

What was the CF problem they were facing?

WMATA looked to redesign their website, along with the Trip Planner. They did not have enough staff to handle everything and decided to hire TeraTech to assist them.

Why they decided to go with TeraTech...

While they focused on the main website, we were brought in, based on our expertise and good reputation in the community, to handle the Trip Planner. 

What we did for them...

We implemented the TrapSoft SOAP interface for their redesigned website. This resulted in the migration of the planner, previously written in hard to maintain PerlScript, to the TrapSoft SOAP/XML interface with a ColdFusion user front end.

The end result?

We created a Trip Planner that coordinates seamlessly with the look and feel of the WMATA website redesign. It occupies a prominent place on the homepage, provides better functionality for WMATA’s users, and contributed to a successful repositioning of their entire website. The Trip Planner now averages 50,000 itineraries a day, doubling the amount of usage from a couple of years ago before the redesign took place.