Flexible transit. On-demand transportation. Demand-responsive transit. Mobility on-demand. App-enabled private multi-passenger transportation service. Microtransit. (Macrotransit?)
Sigh. When it comes to microtransit, there’s no need for confusion (life right now is confusing enough). Anyone who runs in transportation circles has probably heard this buzzword in the past few years. Maybe your community already has some sort of microtransit service but known by a different name. And we’d venture to guess anyone who clicks on an article titled “What is microtransit?” is searching for a better explanation, too.
Microtransit is simply tech-enabled shared transportation that lives in the space between traditional fixed route transit and ride hailing technology. Its routes are nimble; its “schedules” aren’t really schedules at all, as they shift constantly based on rider demand; and its vehicles range in size from vans, shuttles, or buses.
One reason the term "microtransit" gets confusing is because it’s a category that’s seen a warp-speed evolution in the past five or so years, with new players arriving on the scene all the time.
Those dockless e-scooters? Rent-a-mopeds? Bike shares? They’re not exactly microtransit but instead micromobility, a close (and even more micro) relative.
Those old clunky dial-a-ride services? Yep, they’re an early demand-responsive iteration of a larger category we now call microtransit, albeit without any of the technology that makes today’s microtransit efficient and easy to use for riders.
Microtransit is also sometimes difficult to define because it can look very different from city to city — from first-and-last mile rides that make public transit more accessible to operations that feature larger vehicles. “On-demand microtransit could help cities reduce traffic by 15% to 30%.” - Boston Consulting Group Despite their differences, one thing remains true for all microtransit services: their main goal is to expand a network’s geographic and demographic reach, usually serving populations that are low-density, low-income, and/or lacking other reliable transportation options. While the term microtransit picked up steam around 2015, the use of what some people called “flexible routing” has been around for decades in the United States.
Some early microtransit services relied exclusively on fixed routes — while riders could book a seat on their smartphones, the actual route of the vehicle was fixed much like a traditional bus service — but that model proved unsuccessful time and again. In the developing world, passengers from India to Mexico to the Philippines rely on popular vanpooling networks to move around everyday, everywhere.
In contrast to those early services, today’s microtransit means real-time dynamic routing that can change on a moment’s notice, allowing riders to go anywhere in the service zone on-demand. Passengers usually walk a block or two and catch a ride at a “virtual bus stop” — boarding at a common corner avoids unnecessary detours and makes the service much more effective. Along the passenger’s route, sophisticated dynamic routing algorithms use real-time, on-the-ground information to add other people traveling in the same direction into the same vehicle. Riders are picked up and dropped off in an endless stream. This translates into a ride that’s extremely efficient, environmentally friendly, and financially smart.
And the benefits don’t stop there. Modern providers of great microtransit make it a priority to offer full integration with the larger public transportation ecosystem. They offer features like custom-branded (and translated) mobile apps, options to pay with existing fare cards, and multimodal trip planning so riders can get from point A to point B, all in one app. Microtransit is proven to decrease traffic congestion, spur economic development, and reduce the amount of air pollution: we’re talking about a decrease in traffic by 15% to 30% and many tons of carbon emissions, according to Boston Consulting Group. Don’t just take our word for it. The data speaks for itself.
In 2017, the city of Arlington, Texas, replaced its fixed line bus with on-demand microtransit, providing nearly half its population of 400,000 residents with transportation access that wasn’t there before. In February of 2020, the service expanded again and now impacts more than 89,000 jobs, or about 65% of the city’s total.
Across the globe in Canterbury, New Zealand, Timaru’s MyWay service experienced a technological transformation during COVID-19 when transit leaders implemented on-demand technology across the entire bus fleet and created efficient, on-demand trips for essential workers and services.
It’s safe to say that Arlington and Canterbury are extremely different cities with unique challenges, and replicating what worked in either of these cities isn’t guaranteed to work anywhere else. However, microtransit technology and traditional fixed route transportation are not mutually exclusive, and we’ve found that they very often work well paired together. Take Sevenoaks, a town in the UK that’s pairing technology with existing bus lines to bypass stops where no passengers are waiting. By introducing on-demand technology, they eliminated the need for largely empty buses to circle endlessly, resulting in a 77% increase in service utilization while reducing wait times by 75%. Talk about an immediate impact.
Other towns are getting creative with their own service design to infuse microtransit technology into public transportation. One city in Canada, for example, introduced an on-demand option for riders during off-peak hours, when the regular fixed route bus had limited service and wait times were long. The result: utilization increased, and average wait times went from an hour to just 15 minutes.
The skeptic in you is probably whispering, “That’s great, but microtransit can’t possibly work everywhere.” Let’s take a look!
Beyond simply moving people efficiently, microtransit has many more positive benefits on society at large and solves for a wide range of real-world problems, including: