Dubey Awarded Grant to Improve Nashville Transit Efficiency

Abhishek Dubey and research team has received a new grant to develop and deploy a proactive service-management system aimed at reducing passenger wait times and uncertainty on WeGo Public Transit’s Route 55 Murfreesboro, one of Nashville’s busiest bus routes with nearly 5,000 daily riders. The project will address significant service challenges—more than one in four buses currently arrive bunched or gapped, leading to over 105 cumulative hours of excess waiting time per weekday.

The team will leverage machine vision and machine learning to create real-time passenger counts, enhanced vehicle arrival predictions, and overcrowding forecasts. Vanderbilt researchers will lead the development of advanced prediction algorithms for bus arrivals and headways, as well as an intelligent decision support system to assist dispatchers in managing service proactively. This project represents an important step toward smarter, data-driven public transit management in Nashville and beyond.