How one of Canada’s largest and fastest growing agencies served 30% more paratransit rides with 17% fewer vehicle hours

York Region Transit (YRT) serves one of the Greater Toronto Area's largest and fastest-growing regions: 1.2 million residents across nine municipalities north of Toronto. Until recently, YRT delivered its demand response services through a patchwork set of transit solutions – paratransit on Routematch, microtransit on a separate platform, and five distinct services across thirteen zones, each with its own rules, gaps, and workarounds.

YRT Fast Facts:

• 635,000 annual demand response trips delivered by a fleet of roughly 165 vehicles
• Three on-demand microtransit service zones, two specialized services – including a 65+ service for seniors and Mobility On-Request (MOR) paratransit spanning the entirety of the York Region
• AODA compliance, Ontario's accessibility legislation, sets a non-negotiable floor on service span, fares, and feature parity.

The Before:

Years of band-aids around the legacy software's gaps pushed schedulers' shifts from 8 hours to 10. Night-before optimization required line-by-line manual scheduling - and demanded deep knowledge of every address in the sprawling region.

With more than 70 eligibility types and a paper-based application system, YRT found themselves with file rooms full of paper applications, and no easy way for transit coordinators to track SLAs on intake or speed up their process.

And, despite a strong desire to offer a “family of services” approach where paratransit is combined with fixed-route transit to help passengers complete their journeys, YRT’s legacy tools couldn't provide a seamless intermodal journey experience.

The After:

What drew YRT to Via’s software solution was a winning combination of a best-in-class optimization engine, an agentic-AI interface that kept dispatchers in control, deep configurability for their unique service parameters (detour, displacement, load and offload times), and Via’s willingness to phase the rollout to fit their team’s pace.

“They [our staff] were not resistant to change, because it made life so much easier…. We didn’t have that issue. The gentle introduction to the new platform and new way of doing things for our staff really helped.”

— Omilio Brown, Supervisor of Scheduling and Dispatch, Mobility On-Request, YRT

YRT leveraged Via’s software to consolidate paratransit and microtransit onto a single platform and used the migration as an opportunity to optimize service delivery across a host of metrics.

The results are striking: 100% of same-day paratransit requests accommodated, 95% on-time performance, a 17% reduction in vehicle hours, 30% more rides served, and 8 hours of scheduling given back to the team every day.

In particular, YRT attributes their success to:

• A single platform for paratransit and microtransit. One booking system, one optimization engine, one source of truth. Riders, agents, and dispatchers stopped switching contexts; resources became easier to flex across services.
  
• Agentic-AI Powered Scheduling. A fully automated ‘night-before’ schedule optimizer takes the stress off schedulers, freeing them up to focus on getting the supply plan right. They analyze the schedule, find under-served pockets, and head off capacity issues before they become complaints.
• Real-time optimization, re-running every three seconds. With algorithms powered by real-time speed data and a custom prediction model that anticipates where lateness is likely to compound before it happens, dispatchers were freed from having to constantly reassign trips to keep the service on time and moved into strategic oversight. Now they can focus on disruption management and ensuring they find the best solutions for will calls and day-of issues.
• Rider App, web app, and inbound/outbound IVR. Riders see a full itinerary at booking, including fixed-route legs, and get confirmation calls, real-time ETAs, text notifications, and the ability to cancel or rebook themselves through any channel.
  
• The Caregiver App. Day programs (which account for 30–40% of paratransit trips), family members, and remote loved ones get real-time visibility into rides. Staff at community centers can provide updates with a glance at an iPad: “your ride is three blocks away.”
  
• AI-powered eligibility portal. Application intake is scanned automatically, all 70 eligibility types (including conditional eligibility) are managed centrally, supplementary documents are stored digitally, and SLAs are tracked end-to-end. The file room of paper applications is being decommissioned.
  
• Commingling, in stages. YRT began with commingled technology (one platform), now operates commingled fleets (shifts that flex between paratransit and microtransit without mixing rider types on the same vehicle), and is scoping commingled trips (eligibility-based pooling) as a longer-term play.
  
• Powerful data and business intelligence. Via's built-in dashboards, the Remix visualizer with heat-map data, and direct data access let the team run custom reports alongside the out-of-the-box analytics.

“One service, one fleet, one resource delivering to all, because at the end of the day, it's just about connecting riders.”

— Omilio Brown, Supervisor of Scheduling and Dispatch, Mobility On-Request, YRT

Results to Date

Underneath the numbers is a deeper shift. YRT’s team has stepped into a strategic role, using their time, data, and tools to design service proactively and improve the rider experience every day.

• Schedulers who used to leave at midnight now leave on time, with hours of their day reclaimed for service analysis.
  
• Day programs no longer spend afternoons on the phone confirming pickup times. Caregivers have direct access to their loved ones’ whereabouts from the mobile app.
  
• Riders no longer get taken past their destination and doubled back; complaints about routing have all but disappeared.
  
• A “no show” no longer ends a rider’s day, Via’s one-click view of available capacity makes it easy to re-book.

Morale is up. As Omilio put it: “everyone is just overall happier.”

Contact Via about a demo and deeper look at how this could work for your agency.