Public transit agency upgrades website to make it user-friendly (with related video)

Administrators at the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) have successfully completed an upgrade of the agency’s website. With its partner, Burlington, Mass.-based Acquia, the agency migrated the site from a proprietary content management software system to Drupal 7.

The upgrade was completed on an accelerated, four-month schedule and gives BART increased agility and integration with key systems. The site now delivers a digital experience that keeps its ridership connected and informed.

BART trains provide public transit service to more than 400,000 daily riders. As a result, BART.gov is a mission-critical website that provides real-time train schedules, trip planning and fare calculation, and a catalog of third-party apps for riders. BART.gov delivers 30 million page views to approximately 1 million unique visitors every month, with around 20 percent of traffic coming from mobile devices. Keeping riders connected to real-time information is important for customer service, so the transit district made the resiliency of BART.gov a priority during the site upgrade project.

“As a primary information source for riders, we need our site to have 100 percent uptime; we can’t afford to be unavailable for customers when they need real-time information,” says Timothy Moore, web services manager at BART. “Acquia and its development partner, Appnovation, tackled some complex integration requirements, including real-time application programming interfaces (APIs) and other third-party web services.”

The process of improving BART’s site (in photo at right) is never-ending, says Moore. “We’re now exploring more ways to engage our customers through deeper experiences with access to content and community elements across devices.”

Acquia can assist public agencies that are considering the Drupal social publishing system for their sites. The firm also can help governments that are considering technology options to meet the requirements of the Open Government Directive.

Acquia’s Government JumpStart programs are fixed-price consulting engagements from Acquia Professional Services. In these offerings, Acquia will work side-by-side with government IT teams, and will provide mentoring development and other services. Go here for information on Acquia government solutions.

In this video interview, Acquia’s Joe Kroger (in photo at right) discusses his firm’s work, and why Acquia uses Drupal as the content management system for client sites. Kroger talks about federal mandates and standards covering accessibility and security. Kroger says those are additional  reasons why governments are using Drupal to manage content on sites.

Kroger says Acquia works with federal, state and local agencies. ”We help government departments and offices fulfill their vision of the digital experience for their citizens. We assist them meet their Open Government standards and their digital strategies. We work with the federal Department of Justice, BART, the New York State Senate, New York Transit Authority and the Georgia.gov site, which is a gateway to 50 sites for the Georgia state government.”

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