When a small city suddenly parked all its buses to launch a publicly subsidized van service that could get you anywhere in the city for $1.50, the bus drivers were accompanied by migrants from larger cities. There was only one person, the bus driver, who was a police officer.
Milton Burns oversaw crowded subway stations in Washington, D.C., but it was a far cry from the sparsely packed buses he drove after moving to Wilson, North Carolina, to care for his elderly parents. While transit ridership has plummeted almost everywhere during the pandemic, Wilson has seen a sharp increase in ridership since switching from a fixed-route system to an on-demand system using a smartphone app in September 2020.
“We’re picking people up and dropping them off all day long,” said Burns, 59, the only driver working on both systems, as he drove his van on a typically busy morning. “If we can provide door-to-door, personalized service, it will become even more popular.”
For David Bunn, long wait times have made bus routes almost impossible to use, even though his car broke down and he couldn’t afford to replace it. Instead, Bunn, who has two fractured discs in his back, walked five miles (8 kilometers) round trip to buy groceries. He then spotted one of the public vans and dialed the phone number posted on the back window.
“I no longer have to walk everywhere I want to go,” said Bunn, 64. “They’re welcoming, polite and very professional. It’s a great asset to Wilson and a great service to me as well.”
Cities with a population of less than 50,000 people are often cited as models for how sparsely populated areas can utilize transportation in the same way as bustling metropolises.
Wilson secured federal and state infrastructure grants to support shared public transportation that residents summon (usually within 15 minutes) through operating services like Uber and Lyft, but at a fraction of the cost to riders. It was one. The trip now costs him $2.50, which is $1 more than when it was released, and Bunn quipped, “You can’t drive a Pinto for that.”
Other communities in North Carolina and elsewhere have taken notice and started their own programs using available public funds, increasing Wilson’s competition for continued grants. There is.
These small-scale, technology-based solutions to the public transportation problem, widely known as microtransit, are at odds with the battle for infrastructure investment that has traditionally pitted urban bus, train, and subway needs against road-building projects. , has emerged as a good equilibrium point. Rural society demands it.
“We don’t think of transportation as just for big cities,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told The Associated Press. “We want people to benefit wherever they live, including in sparsely populated rural areas. The point of transportation is that there are no buses. The point of transit is to get people in need. It’s about taking me somewhere.”
Ryan Brumfield, director of the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s Division of Integrated Mobility, said Wilson’s move to microtransit was largely done out of necessity. Officials trying to reduce Wilson’s sagging unemployment rate are first concerned with the fact that in some parts of the 23-square-mile (59-square-kilometer) city, as many as three in 10 residents don’t have access to a car to get to work. I had to deal with that fact. .
“The combination of a lot of people needing the service and a fairly high density of services makes on-demand a great fit,” Brumfield says.
More than half of the rides are for residents who use the vans to “keep their jobs or get jobs,” said Roger Lentz, Wilson’s deputy city manager who pushed for the switch.
But necessity and convenience weren’t the only reasons why the city’s public transit ridership skyrocketed by 300%. Image was also a factor.
“In small towns in the South, there’s a general perception that public transit is for low-income people,” said Gronna Jones, Wilson’s transportation manager. “There’s a stigma attached to riding a bus. Using microtransit and non-traditional vehicles has eliminated that stigma.”
Wilson partnered with New York-based Via, one of the nation’s top microtransit companies, to create the software and launch an on-demand public van service known as RIDE.
Via started seven years ago with what was then a consumer service offering van rides in areas not served by the New York City subway on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But founder and CEO Daniel Lamott has always considered Via a public transit company, not a private competitor to Uber, although it took time for cities to buy in. said.
“We literally couldn’t see each other,” Lamott said. “They said it was the stupidest idea they had ever heard, that it would never work, that public transportation was buses and trains.”
The first city to sign a public contract with Via was Austin, the capital of Texas, where certain corridors were well served by city buses, while others were considered transportation deserts. Since then, Via has expanded to fill transportation gaps in a wide range of communities in the United States and abroad.
On the Blackfeet Reservation in rural Montana, residents can use an app to order door-to-door transportation. At Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, one of the nation’s busiest airports, overnight FedEx freight workers are now using it to get home.
“Every trip is individual,” said Melinda Metzger, executive director of PACE, the Chicago-area bus system that partnered with Via on O’Hare’s transportation service this summer. “People are moving in different directions, and the biggest thing is that patterns have changed. We need to understand them and adapt to them.”
The pandemic has dramatically changed the nation’s transportation needs, but it has also helped demonstrate one of microtransit’s greatest assets: agility. While subway systems and even major bus routes lack the flexibility to change service on the fly as demand changes, microtransit can accommodate such fluctuations if specifically tailored to each community. It is designed to be accurate.
“This is not just a music guy to carry from city to city,” said Alvaro Villagran, federal program director for the Center for Cooperative Mobility, which supports grant recipients of microtransit projects. “There are opportunities and challenges that need to be considered at the local level.”
Still, the biggest challenge is almost universal: cost.
The Biden administration has prioritized public transportation and microtransit projects, providing subsidies through the $1 trillion infrastructure law enacted in 2021, but demand for the limited amount of money has soared.
Kai Monast, deputy director of North Carolina State University’s Institute for Transportation Research and Education, said even Wilson won’t be able to operate under the microtransit pilot program forever unless it finds new ways to pay for it. Stated.
Monast said Wilson will continue to focus on microtransit, but the community will eventually return in part to a fixed route system that has been heavily adjusted from data collected through years of on-demand van rides. I predict that I will be deaf. But he trusts in the creativity of cities to make them more efficient.
“We may find answers that didn’t exist before,” Monast said.
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McMurray reported from Chicago.