A consultant-grade plan from documents already on hand

A consultant working on a state road study asked for our current transit planning documents. We had a safety plan, the regional transportation plan and years of operating records. We did not have a single stand-alone transit plan to hand over.

What I asked

First, I asked Claude to check whether we had already covered these documents in earlier conversations. Then I asked it to build a transit plan from the sources we had, and to make it look like something a consulting firm would produce.

What came back

A 14-page, print-ready plan:

• A cover page.
• Charts of ridership and operations: five donut charts, two bar charts and a trend line.
• A schematic of the route network.
• An organization chart.
• A diagram showing how the plan fits under the regional and state plans.
• A phased roadmap.

Everything in it came from documents we already had on file. Nothing was invented. Where the sources did not say something, the plan did not say it.

Two rounds of revision

I asked for more visual polish, and then for a change in how one future service was presented. Each time I got a complete new file back, not a list of edits to make myself.

The part I did myself

The plan mentions a service we are still evaluating. Anything that sounds like a commitment about timing needs to be read by our legal and public information staff before it leaves the building. Claude had that note from me and kept the language conditional. The review itself is still a job for people.

Where it falls short

A plan assembled from existing documents is only as current as those documents. It is a faithful summary, not new analysis. If you need new analysis, you still need a study.

Try it

Gather what you already have, upload it, and ask for one document that tells the whole story with sources.

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Part of the series 27 ways I actually use AI. Claude drafted this post from the record of our work together.