Transit Pipeline: Leveling the Bid Process for Local Transit Providers

For local and regional transit providers trying to stay competitive, it's time to talk about the elephant in the room: the bid process.

Local providers are often bidding against national firms with entire teams dedicated to winning the next contract. Those teams are tracking things like incumbent strengths and weaknesses, agency history, and more. They know what's coming long before an RFP ever hits the street. That intelligence costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in staff, systems, research, and travel. But the reward? When the RFP drops, their work is half done.

Compare this to a typical local operator trying to shoestring a proposal together with a limited staff that's already busy doing something fairly important: actually running the service.

There are tools that monitor RFP releases. There are tools that help draft proposals. I haven't found anything that addresses the whole problem, so this past June I started building an opportunity and proposal intelligence system specifically for small and medium sized providers. Earlier visibility, better pursuit decisions, better positioning and a dramatically better response when it's time to compete.

The product's name is Transit Pipeline. After a couple months it's already producing some impressive results. Access is invitation only while we prove the system with a small group of real operators. We plan to invite a few new partners in October and every few months thereafter. If you operate paratransit, dial a ride, fixed route, or shuttle services and want to be considered, there's a short interest form at https://lnkd.in/gMChvagr (opens in a new tab).

More to come.