Stop Hunting for Buses. Start Running Your Yard.

Every transit agency knows the drill. It’s 5:45 AM. Pull-out starts in fifteen minutes. A dispatcher is on the radio asking where Bus 412 is parked. A utility worker is walking the lot with a flashlight. Maintenance thinks it’s in the back row. Nobody’s sure.

ETA Transit’s new Yard Management feature is built to end that conversation for good.

A Live Picture of Your Entire Yard

Yard Management gives dispatchers, supervisors, and maintenance staff a shared, real-time view of exactly which buses are parked where, across one yard or many. Every spot on your map reflects what’s actually happening on the ground, updated as soon as someone makes a move.

No more guessing. No more radio tag. No more walking the lot at dawn.

The yard map is configurable to mirror your actual facility layout, with individually labeled spots, clear color coding for occupied and empty spaces, and visual indicators for spots that are blocked, reserved, or out of service. If your agency has multiple yards or sub-facilities, you can manage all of them from a single interface.

Built for Everyone Who Touches the Yard

Yard Management isn’t just a dispatcher tool. It’s designed to serve every role involved in getting buses out the door and safely back at night.

Dispatchers get a live assignment view with search by bus number, route, block, or spot. Exceptions surface automatically, unassigned buses, duplicate assignments, buses marked in the yard but not placed in a spot, so nothing slips through at pull-out time.

Maintenance staff can mark buses as inoperable, log the reason and anticipated return date, and flag them clearly so dispatchers know not to assign those vehicles to operators. A bus sitting in a spot with a dead battery or an oil leak will show up as out of service before anyone tries to put it into revenue service.

Utility workers and yard supervisors get a tablet-friendly interface with large touch targets and a simple two-step move workflow: select the bus, select the destination, confirm. The map updates immediately for everyone else watching.

Operators and drivers can see their assigned parking spot without hunting down a supervisor, and the system can be configured to surface that assignment automatically when a vehicle enters the yard geofence.

Yard Management Meets the Reality of Transit Operations

The feature was designed with transit operations in mind, not just fleet logistics. That means it handles real-world scenarios that other tools miss:

Buses don’t always stay on site. Yard Management supports off-site tracking for vehicles at an external maintenance facility, a body shop, a fueling station, or another location, with a simple label and date-out/date-returned log so nothing falls off the map.

Spots have rules. Electric vehicle charging spots can be restricted so they don’t accept CNG or diesel buses. Maintenance-only lanes stay separate from general parking. Overflow and wash lanes are supported.

Things change fast. When a bus pulls out of the yard, the system can automatically clear its spot based on geofence data, so the map reflects the current state without anyone having to manually update it.

Every action is logged. Who assigned a bus to a spot, who moved it, who marked it out of service, and when, all of it is captured in a full audit trail.

A Display Built for the Dispatch Floor

For agencies that want a heads-up view on a TV screen or large display in the dispatch building, Yard Management includes a read-only display mode designed to be read from across the room. Large labels, high contrast, automatic refresh, and a clean layout show the full yard at a glance without requiring anyone to touch it.

Pull-out supervisors, maintenance coordinators, and drivers checking their assignment can all get what they need from the same display.

The End of the Morning Scramble

Yard Management is part of ETA Transit’s broader platform for fixed-route transit operations, built on the same CAD/AVL foundation your agency already uses. It integrates with existing vehicle status and dispatch workflows, so the data you’re already collecting starts working harder for you.

If your agency is spending time every morning locating vehicles, sorting out maintenance holds, or coordinating yard movements by radio, we’d like to show you what a live yard map looks like in practice.