When you deliver as many rides as we have (150M and counting), you learn a lot about how riders think and behave, and how technological and environmental factors affect the choices they tend to make. We’ve found that riders tolerate longer wait times only if they trust that they’re accurate. We’ve seen that in more urban environments with good sidewalk infrastructure, riders are willing to walk a longer distance to a pickup point if it reduces their wait; but in more suburban areas, or at night, a long walk can be expected to deter ridership.
Now that Via is launching more and more Integrated Transit services — where microtransit is designed to complement and coordinate with fixed route — our Data Science and Product teams have worked together to analyze the data from 25 of our integrated services and design an intuitive and seamless experience for intermodal trips.
A great intermodal transit network starts with thoughtful service design, with the goal of putting the right modes in the right places. A great intermodal rider app makes your thoughtfully-designed network navigable and welcoming. How do we deliver this rider experience? By prioritizing these three principles:
- Curation: presenting a mix of trips that are appealing to riders and cost-effective for transit agencies.
- Connections: offering timed transfers between modes, and tools to plan for tight connections and recover from missed ones.
- Confidence: highlighting bus stops and schedules in-app, flagging when microtransit availability is low, and building microtransit zones that are simple and easy-to-navigate.
Read on to learn about the app features — and the data that informs them — that meet riders where they are.
Curating appealing and cost-effective trips.
We approach trip curation in the rider app in two main ways: we curate the types of trips shown, and the number of trip options shown. With these filtering decisions, we guide riders to trips that are more cost-effective for transit agencies, and only show trips that we know — based on service data — riders are interested in taking.
Here’s how we think about it:
- Curating trip type. This is where Mode Preference, the Via algorithm’s anti-cannibalization function, really shines. Mode Preference ensures that riders only receive a microtransit proposal if a good fixed route or intermodal option is unavailable. By nudging riders toward these more cost-effective transit options, our partner agencies keep costs under control and reserve microtransit capacity for riders traveling outside the reach of the fixed-route network.
- Curating number of proposals. It’s possible — even likely — that there will be multiple trip options that meet an agency’s standards or Mode Preference settings. When riders are faced with many trip proposals, they take longer to decide — clogging up capacity other riders could use — and might even freeze or give up. And as it turns out, even though riders take a long time to decide between options, data shows that they ultimately make decisions along pretty predictable lines. So we limit the number of trips we show to make the in-app experience more manageable, while foregrounding the kinds of trips we know riders are actually likely to pick.
Managing tight connections.
With intermodal trips, a major rider concern is missing connections. A journey that begins by riding a few stops on the bus, then catching a microtransit vehicle, may look like it saves the most time and eliminates a long walk — but what if the bus is running late?
Via’s intermodal Rider App has a few tricks up its sleeve to help riders make informed decisions about tight connections and quickly find travel alternatives if anything goes wrong:
- “Short connection” warnings. When the app proposes an intermodal journey, any particularly tight connections are clearly flagged for riders to review. This means there are no surprises, and riders know to hustle when transferring to the next leg of their trip (or pick a journey with a longer connection time if they prefer not to rush).
- In-app fixed-route schedules. Fixed-route stops are highlighted in-app, and unfold to show dynamically-updated upcoming departures. When using the app to navigate an intermodal journey, similar departure data shows up in the on-ride interface. With this information foregrounded, riders can easily find an alternative route in the event of a delay or cancellation.
These features make riders more comfortable taking intermodal trips — which, in turn, raises the likelihood that they’ll select intermodal journey options when offered.
Instilling confidence in the transit network.
Building rider trust is crucial to growing public transit ridership. Riders must feel confident that they understand the transit network, and that certain kinds of trips will be available when they expect.
The Via intermodal app builds this kind of trust in a few ways. Trip curation and connection management, discussed above, certainly help. But we also help riders understand the shape and dynamics of the network as they're navigating, so they can anticipate when and where they can travel and make confident plans. Here are a few of those features:
- “Low availability” warnings for microtransit. When microtransit is offered, but demand is high, riders are warned to book sooner rather than later to secure their seat.
- Intuitively-designed microtransit zones. Without a strong anti-cannibalization feature like Mode Preference, agencies often rely on complicated, rules-heavy microtransit zones (and sub-zones) to control when riders can take a microtransit trip. But these zones can be really confusing for riders to navigate — and frustrating when a rider thinks they can get a micro trip in a particular area, only to be told they’re out of zone or violating some trip rule they don’t understand. With Mode Preference, a large, easy-to-understand microtransit zone can be laid atop your fixed-route network without drawing ridership away.
What's next?
Want to learn more about integrated transit? Check out our overview of the Mode Preference feature, and reach out below to chat.
