RMWB Transit — route optimization

The problem

The municipality had just inherited its transit system from the previous operator and faced a significant knowledge gap with the main system. Schedulers were spending hours manually building driver routes — 50+ drivers and hundreds of routes across the entire city of Fort McMurray — while the department came up to speed and formal training was put in place.

The constraint

This wasn't even my main role — I was the Senior Business Analyst — but the transit department needed help now. The fix had to be fast, temporary by design, and live in the practical tool already on hand: Excel.

What I did

I was the Senior Business Analyst — primarily a senior business-process-improvement role — but when the transit department needed help in an emergency, I took on a second role to keep it moving.

I built a custom optimization script in Excel/VBA that computed the best routes for each driver schedule: 50+ drivers, hundreds of routes, all of Fort McMurray.

The point wasn't a permanent platform — it was a deliberate, temporary bridge. Something that lived in the tool already on the desk and kept a whole city's transit running while the team rebuilt its footing on the freshly inherited main system. Temporary by design was the whole idea.

The outcome

Route generation dropped from hours to minutes, and the city had a working optimization engine to bridge the gap — exactly the temporary stopgap it was meant to be, holding the line until the department was back up to speed on the main system.