CHAPTER 5

Conclusions

This chapter summarizes the key findings from this synthesis regarding the state of the practice in the provision of rural microtransit service. The section concludes with suggestions for future research.

Key Findings

• The ability to travel spontaneously or on shorter notice and book trips via mobile app are features of rural microtransit service that customers greatly appreciate and say improve their quality of life. Nearly all the agencies that responded to the survey noted that they had received widespread positive feedback from customers about the benefits of the service. This message was echoed among most of the case example agencies as well.
• Several agencies are considering implementing, or re-implementing, other transit service types to meet the travel needs of more customers in their communities and decrease the unmet demand for their microtransit services. In some cases, agencies have found that on-demand microtransit may not be the transit mode that makes sense for certain locations or to meet certain travel needs. Hall Area Transit is in the process of re-implementing fixed-route service, BRATS is implementing vanpooling, and BATA and Moray Council are both exploring integration of microtransit technology into deviated route service.
• Most agencies that have tried to implement truly on-demand microtransit service (i.e., with all or most of its trips being same-day or spontaneous trips) across large service areas have transitioned back to requiring pre-booking due to overwhelming demand. This finding is particularly true for agencies that cover large service areas with limited resources, such as BCT and BRATS. Operator shortages, vehicle shortages, and/or funding limitations are factors that constrain agencies’ levels of service. Understanding the level of demand and having enough vehicles and drivers to meet it are important to maintaining reliable service across a large service area.
• The challenge of not being able to meet high levels of demand when serving large geographies indicates that there is an important trade-off to consider when determining whether to offer a lower level of service everywhere or a higher level of service in a more limited geography. Effectively addressing this trade-off, which is especially apparent for BCT and BRATS, requires revisiting the goals of the service. Agencies whose primary goal is to extend coverage may prioritize that over offering a more reliably available or efficient service. Agencies offering service after 7:00 p.m. (BATA, HIRTA, and PICK Transportation) provide trips only in smaller zones during those hours (compared to much greater daytime coverage).
• Most agencies, even when they have stated policies of not prioritizing certain types of customers or trips, still do this by enabling subscription trips. These agencies are generally motivated by recognition of the need to ensure that customers are able to access life-sustaining or life-saving medical care. Bay Transit; BRATS; HIRTA; Mountain Empire Older Citizens, Inc.;

• NCRTD; and Southeast Vermont Transit all allow customers to book subscription trips two or more weeks in advance to ensure they can get on the schedule. The agency that does not prioritize any type of ADA or medical trips during the daytime, BCT, can do so because a separate paratransit service to meet that need is available.
• Some agencies have implemented or are exploring customized strategies to try to manage demand. These strategies include reserving capacity to make trip bookings available at more than one point in time (BCT), directing vehicles to certain areas before accepting on-demand trip requests, adjusting fares to encourage judicious use of the service in the evenings, and considering premium fare options to encourage use of more cost-effective modes (Hall Area Transit).
• Creating partnerships for small and rural agencies to implement microtransit is a time-intensive practice that has produced benefits in some cases, while it has been challenging in others. PICK Transportation is a successful example of agencies partnering to implement a service in a way that consolidates a key function (call center operations) for improved efficiency. BCT’s operational integration of a traditional dial-a-ride service within its service area represents a step in the direction of increasing efficiency by streamlining and consolidating operations. At the same time, other agencies experienced challenges with partnering to provide microtransit service.
• Many case example agencies said they had achieved significant operational efficiencies by implementing new software with app-based booking and dynamic routing capabilities; however, at least one noted that the efficiency gains were not as high as it had hoped. Efficiency gains typically came in the form of reducing the workload of call center staff responsible for booking and dispatching trips and manually adjusting schedules to accommodate ADA trips, and reductions in no-show and last-minute cancellation rates. At the same time, some agencies noted that it was still difficult to achieve significant efficiency gains when covering a large geographic area.
• Adoption of app-based booking requires a population that is receptive to using it, with hands-on training important to help convince hesitant users to try it. One-on-one customer sessions, participation in community events, conducting in-person workshops at key locations such as senior centers, promotional discounts, and how-to videos were strategies that many agencies found effective. Hands-on assistance from agency staff, including call center representatives, seems to have had the greatest impact.
• Distance-based and higher fares are common for rural microtransit providers, particularly those operating countywide or across a larger service area. BRATS, BCT, HIRTA, and Hall Area Transit all charge customers distance-based fares, which range from $2.00 at the lowest (BRATS and Hall Area Transit) to $15.00 for more than 20 miles (BCT). They are also the agencies whose service areas are the largest, apart from BATA, whose flat fare is $6.00, which is higher than the maximum fare for trips of any length for BRATS and HIRTA, and for the cost of trips of 10 or fewer miles on BCT ($5.00).
• Most agencies offer service that ends between 4:30 and 7:00 p.m., if not earlier, with the exception of service in smaller zones within their larger service areas. In addition, most rural microtransit providers operate Monday through Friday. The agencies that offer evening service operate in smaller service areas than their daytime service areas.
• Zone sizes vary considerably. All but one of the agencies operate across zones of at least 300 square miles, and one agency operates across more than 4,000 square miles. Only PICK Transportation operates in relatively smaller zones; however, that service is a supplement to daytime service across larger service areas.
• Agencies have taken different approaches to combining or co-mingling their microtransit and ADA complementary paratransit services. Agencies that have maintained separate paratransit and microtransit operations have found some ADA (or other paratransit-eligible) customers organically shifting to microtransit because they prefer it. The different

• experiences of BATA and BCT, in particular, suggest that co-mingling can be feasible but requires adequate capacity.
• Several agencies said a “slow launch” was an effective strategy, and other agencies said that they wished they had implemented service on a more incremental basis. Incremental implementation allows agencies to test software and a new service model on a small scale, working out any issues before launching the service across a larger area. BRATS and HIRTA were agencies that recommended a slow or incremental launch based on experiences implementing the service across their entire service area at the same time, while NCRTD took the incremental approach and found that it worked well for the agency.
• Proactive and ongoing engagement with employees was a strategy that benefited multiple agencies in implementation. BATA, BCT, and HIRTA were all able to find ways to engage with staff to enhance the success of their implementation and reduce hurdles, while BRATS offered some lessons learned about adequately preparing their drivers for an overhaul of how the service functions.
• Federal and state grant programs for microtransit services in rural areas made implementation of several of the case example agencies’ services possible. Funding agencies appear to have been willing to support pilots or new services because they see potential for the services to serve as proofs-of-concept and improve the state of the practice, as well as produce lessons learned that can be shared across the industry. BCT, BRATS, Hall Area Transit, and PICK Transportation all noted that they would not have been able to implement, or would have had more difficulty implementing, their services without supplemental funding, and HIRTA is now working with a federal grant to implement a proof-of-concept to advance the benefits of microtransit to customers requiring medical transportation.
• The state of the practice indicates there is more work that can be done to identify and use innovative, nontraditional performance metrics to measure the benefits of rural microtransit service. Given that the goal of rural microtransit service is generally to improve customers’ quality of life and health (both physical and emotional), as well as ensure they can access critical opportunities, relatively few performance measures beyond customer satisfaction measures exist to assess whether these goals are being achieved. This may be the case because identifying and tracking such complex metrics on an ongoing basis is a time- and funding-intensive effort that few small or rural agencies have the resources to undertake.

Related and Future Research

Concurrent efforts related to this study include NCHRP Project 08-130, “Best Practices in Coordination of Public Transit and Ride Sharing” and TCRP Project J-07/Topic SB-42, “Operational and Service Factors When Integrating/Consolidating ADA Paratransit and On-Demand Services.”

This project has identified other topics and questions related to microtransit service that could be explored in further research:

• What additional performance metrics could be used to evaluate the impacts and benefits of microtransit and/or other transportation services that are harder to quantify, such as healthcare outcome improvements resulting from a reduction in isolation among older adults, or employment retention outcomes?
• As more agencies offer overlapping microtransit and fixed-route transit, what is the state of the practice regarding incentivizing or requiring customers to use fixed-route transit for trips most efficiently made on that mode?
• What are the barriers to small or rural agencies partnering to collaboratively procure and/or offer microtransit service?