We have all seen the news stories and future tense projections for on demand and last mile small bus transport systems, notionally controlled by an app or operating on a. regular loop to feed trunk route express buses.
Many of the above ideas have been floated and even started here in Australia, but nearly a decade after these ideas were first floated, there doesn’t seem to heave been very much progress.
So almost a decade after startups began pitching the “microtransit” concept as the potential future of urban mobility, transportation planners apparently remain divided over whether on-demand mini bus service can be a more efficient alternative to traditional large bus systems.
There is still hope however with the largest micro-transit provider in the US, Via, betting that the two can in fact go hand-in-hand.
Via recently debuted a hybrid system that integrates its trademark services into the public bus network starting in the US state of South Dakota, around its fast-growing and sprawling city of Sioux Falls.
Like a lot of Australian urban sprawls, Sioux Falls residents on the outskirts often lack transit access.
Via claims the overhaul simplifies existing bus lines to increase frequency, and uses mini buses and vans to reach passenger not served by those routes. The on-demand service has so far proven popular, in fact it has been perhaps too popular
“Microtransit” has apparently polarised transportation planners ever since startups began touting it as the future of urban mobility int he mid-2010s.
Proponents for the concept say that on-demand vans hailed via smartphone apps can provide better service, at a lower cost, than traditional buses in low-density neighbourhoods. One only has to spy traditional 60 or 70 passenger buses roaming our increasingly narrow suburban streets with virtually no one on board to see the work of smaller, higher frequency bus services.
However critics counter that “microtransit” is expensive and inefficient, taking money away fromwhmat they describe as tried-and-true solutions.
Via says it is trying to break that binary and in September, the company debuted a new transit network in South Dakota, that combines its trademark on-demand mini buses with traditional fixed-route bus lines.
“There is a movement in public transit to deploy the right kind of service in the right place,” Via CEO Daniel Ramot said.
“Microtransit is not a panacea for everything. It shouldn’t be used everywhere. It is a certain type of public transit that, if used appropriately, can be a good solution,” he added.
It’s too early to tell if Sioux Falls has the right mix for Via’s model — some early accounts from riders and drivers suggest that there may be too much demand for the microtransit buses.
However in concept, the company’s hybrid system could point to a potential middle way for a transit industry still reeling from remote work and bracing for new rounds of technological disruption.
Sioux Falls has around 200,000 residents spread across more than 130 square kilometres and is also one of the fastest-growing in the US, with more than twice as many people as it had back in 1990, including a growing number of foreign-born newcomers. There’s a small, walkable downtown area, but most job centers, including a new Amazon warehouse, are on the outskirts.
As the city has sprawled, its transit system, Sioux Area Metro, or SAM , has remained mostly unchanged.
“It was just a system that was ripe for disruption and innovation,” said Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken.
“We’re using 40-foot buses and there’s three people on them at a time. We were hitting a nail with a sledgehammer,” said TenHaken.
Only 60per cent of the city, and 45 per cent of residents, were within walking distance of transit service, and buses arrived once per hour at best.
“The ’burbs and the fringes of the community really didn’t have access to public transit,” TenHaken said.
In 2023, the city issued a request for proposals for a new operator to run its transit and paratransit services. The goal, TenHaken said, was to get better outcomes for the same budget. Via won the $US12 million annual contract with its promise to redesign the bus network and integrate its trademark ‘microtransit’ service.
Via took over operations at the start of this year and by last month (September) it was ready to roll out its new network design.
Via said that informed by data it had collected over the preceding months, as well as community meetings, it consolidated 12 bus routes into nine. The new routes are shorter and straighter, which allows for more frequent service. Some lines now run every 30 minutes, at peak, compared to every 60 minutes in the previous network. Overall bus revenue hours, an objective measure of the amount of service an agency provides, are about the same as they were pre-redesign.
Via says that 93 per cent of passengers on the old network still have access to fixed-route buses on the new network. Everyone else, including those who previously lacked bus service, will be in the catchment area of Via’s microtransit mini buses, which provide rides for the same $US1.50 fare as a bus. The microtransit service, called SAM on Demand, relaunched in August and saw 4,500 rides in the first month.
For some passengers, the on-demand service is already too popular.
“I give it about 60 to 75 minutes to book a trip,” said Sioux Falls resident Robert Elliott.
“A lot of times the app doesn’t work. It says ‘Microtransit not available.’” Elliott said he has also been frustrated by the routes microtransit vehicles take once he’s on board.
“The GPS mapping for some of these trips is completely ludicrous,.” he added.
Elliott’s concerns highlight an inherent challenge for microtransit. Bus systems can accommodate significant increases in demand with their existing vehicle fleets, which can carry dozens of passengers at a time, but adding passengers to a microtransit system typically requires purchasing more vehicles, hiring more drivers and covering a lot more miles.
Via wouldn’t say what its target microtransit ridership is for Sioux Falls, or how many riders the system is designed to handle. The company shared that the average wait time for a microtransit ride in the city is 19 minutes, and that it’s currently able to fulfill 94% of ride requests. High demand could be coming, in part, from limited time free ride promotions meant to introduce riders to the service. Just over half of microtransit rides in the city are shared, the company said. Those trips are, by definition, not perfectly direct.
One benefit of Via’s hybrid system in Sioux Falls is that the company can adjust fixed-route bus lines to serve high-ridership areas on the microtransit system. The company has said it will continue to monitor rider data and adjust bus routes accordingly.
Some Sioux Falls residents love the Via system claiming that wait times haven’t been such an issue, with some saying they have never had to wait more than 30 minutes, while most trips have been around a 15 minute wait.
Via hasn’t disclosed what its target microtransit passenger rates are in Sioux Falls, or how many passengers the system is designed to handle. The company shared that the average wait time for a microtransit trip in the city is 19 minutes, and that it’s currently able to fulfill 94 per cent of passenger requests.
One benefit of Via’s hybrid system in Sioux Falls is that the company can adjust fixed-route bus lines to serve high-passenger areas on the microtransit system. The company has said it will continue to monitor rider data and adjust bus routes accordingly.
A US union report concludes that on-demand, point-to-point service “is less impressive and more expensive than the marketing suggests.”
However, unions have been happy with other aspects of Via’s management. The company apparently preserved existing contracts and kept on the entire staff. It has also accelerated hiring for operators of SAM’s fixed-route buses, which had previously been a major challenge. Like bus operators, all microtransit drivers are eligible to join the union. The company said it plans to continue hiring more drivers.
The pivot to microtransit, in Sioux Falls and other small and mid-sized cities in the US, comes amid a long-running decline in city transit usage.
SAM provided about half a million rides in 2023, well below its 2019 passenger numbers of roughly 800,000 annual trips. Even before the pandemic, bus and paratransit passenger numbers were on a downward slide from a 2013 high of about 1.1 million annual trips, despite the region’s population growth.
Mayor TenHaken, attributed the trend to the rise of rideshare services like Uber and Lyft and the fact that cars have become “a more attainable luxury” over the past decade.
“We’ve got a post-pandemic urban environment where, for many smaller cities, fixed-route transit, which wasn’t making a ton of sense pre-pandemic, makes even less sense,” said Joshua Schank, a partner at InfraStrategies, where he advises cities on transportation policy. Via’s system in Sioux Falls looks like “a good combination of incorporating the new and the old.”
Still, Schank cautions that Via will fall short of being a “complete game-changer” in Sioux Falls.
“Is there an example where microtransit is such a shining light that it has attracted far more people to the transit system than ever before? No, I don’t think that exists,” Schank said.
“What it does is it provides a better service than existing services that will wind up increasing demand to some extent,” he added.
According to data provided by the company, the introduction of Via significantly increased transit passengers in some places where existing service was poor. In similar sized US cities such as Wilson, North Carolina, and Denton County, Texas, total passengers more than tripled after Via began operations, compared to previous skeletal bus services, even as per-ride subsidies decreased.
However there is still a ceiling on the total number of passengers a microtransit a system can ever serve. That’s because 70 per cent of the cost of operating transit is labour. The difference in cost between running an 80-person bus and a six-seat van/mini bus is surprisingly small.
Should the labour equation change, as it might with autonomous vehicles then platforms like Via’s will be well-positioned to take advantage.
The company currently runs driverless shuttles from May Mobility at Sun City in the US state of Arizona, and more autonomous vehicle partnerships will be announced soon according to the company.
“As robotaxis become available, there could be a very interesting opportunity to deploy some of those vehicles onto this public transit network that we have,” said Via CEO Ramot.
At this point the most significant innovation Via has brought to Sioux Falls is really its app, which allows for trip planning, real-time tracking and payment all in one place. Four out of every five passengers now pay on the app, double the rate compared to a year ago. For people without access to a smartphone, microtransit can also be summoned over the phone, and the bus fare can be paid in cash.
“One of the ways that we’re hoping to restore growth is through introducing technology and a far more modern service,” said Ramot.
“It’s very easy, through the app, to discover when the bus is coming and where it’s going, you don’t need to have a Ph.D.”
Via’s aggressive marketing and high-tech sheen has, at the very least, put transit on more people’s radar in Sioux Falls.
“There’s actual public excitement around public transit, and that’s just not happened in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, before,” Mayor TenHaken said.
“People are rethinking about public transit as a mode of transportation in our community, when maybe they had written it off previously,” he added.
