Transit in America is in rough shape. The lockdowns at the start of the pandemic cratered bus ridership across the country, causing many Americans to wonder if transit has a future in a nation where 90% of households already own a car.
Even as the recently passed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act inject billions into agencies struggling to attract riders, the pandemic sped up a decades-long process that has seen downtowns shrink in importance as employment centers, throwing the value of traditional commuter-oriented transit into question. At the same time, a new generation of first-time homebuyers, many enjoying work-from-home options, is moving to the suburbs — most of which are designed to be outright hostile to transit.
Simply put, it is difficult to see transit ridership making a rebound to its 2019 days anytime soon. This is a serious problem not only for millions of Americans who rely on transit to avoid and escape poverty, but for all Americans. This is because we need transit to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve traffic congestion, which lowers the cost of mobility for everyone.
But what if, rather than being its death knell, 2022 signaled a rebirth of American transit? It has its problems, but transit is getting its largest cash injection in a generation right when useful technologies are becoming more affordable, and many Americans are rethinking what they want from their transportation system.
Roll in the minibus
In recent years, transit agencies across the county, from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, Austin, Texas, to Shreveport, Louisiana, have been experimenting with the newest fad in transit. It’s called “on-demand microtransit,” and your grandmother who uses a walker, or budget-strapped teen attending college, or tech bro living downtown, or cousin living in a rural county might be using it to overcome our nation’s failure to fund adequate transportation options.
“Microtransit” is something smaller than a standard city bus. It can be a minibus or even a minivan, but it is operated by your local transit agency (in our case, that would be TriMet) and can provide the same service as a normal bus. “On-demand” usually describes a bus that you can hail with a smartphone, just like Uber or Lyft.
When riders can hail a minibus from anywhere and be dropped off anywhere, that on-demand microtransit service is providing corner-to-corner service and can be described as “flexible transit.”
Flexible on-demand microtransit can look very different depending on where and why it has been introduced, and this malleability might explain why the trendy new way to transit is popping up in communities big and small, in blue towns and red states.
Residents in Valdosta, Georgia (pop. 56,000), have requested more than 10,000 rides a month from the on-demand service since it started in 2021. According to Valdosta's mayor, nearly half of the riders are going to work or school, but the rest are using the service for daily errands that might not all neatly align with a traditional bus service, including visiting friends, grocery shopping and visiting the library.
As cities shift away from traditional downtown commute patterns, transit will have to start capturing those trips in order to regain riders.
Valdosta’s on-demand service is similar to RIDE in Wilson, North Carolina (pop. 50,000), which provides corner-to-corner service at $1.50. Since 2020, RIDE has been able to more than double the town’s transit service area and nearly triple the number of weekly riders. Interestingly, Wilson’s Assistant City Manager Rodger Lentz recently said while RIDE is aimed at riders who are transit-dependent, it also has attracted riders who otherwise would have likely driven or taken a cab. As RIDErs share their rides with other passengers, this means a transit service very similar to Uber or Lyft can operate with cars on the road, reducing congestion while saving riders money.
Big cities are hopping on the trend as well. In Salt Lake City, the Utah Transit Authority developed UTA On Demand, while Austin, Texas and Shreveport, Louisiana, have added the Texas CapMetro’s Pickup and SportTran to their respective transit systems. Perhaps the best model for Portland can be found in America’s second-largest metro. In Los Angeles County, transit users in some cities have two on-demand microtransit services: LA Now and Metro Micro.
LA Now is a shared ride service through which users in a handful of neighborhoods in west Los Angeles can hail a small bus to pick them up at a designated pick-up/drop-off point. According to the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, these points are never more than a few blocks away. Adult tickets cost a flat $1.50 fee, and riders can pay with cash.
Although LA Now is clearly targeting commuter trips with operating times only between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays, such a service would also be incredibly useful for mid-day trips to the grocery store or lunch spot or for people whose lives don’t exist in the 9-to-5 schedule.
Angelenos who don’t live in LA Now’s service area may instead have access to Metro Micro, which operates in select cities in Los Angeles County.
In a review comparing his experience using Metro Micro versus Uber, Dave Amos, Cal Poly planning professor and YouTuber, found Uber outperforms the new transit service in terms of ease of use and wait time. Amos also noted Metro Micro’s cheap ticket price ($1), better labor standards for employees and the fact it is designed to fill in the gaps of regular transit service — rather than replace transit service — are all ways in which Metro Micro demonstrates how on-demand microtransit can improve upon the services of one of Silicon Valley’s most famous disruptors.
Of course, the more U.S. cities experiment with microtransit, the more its other downsides become clear.
According to a 2019 report by TransitCenter, a transit advocate that also conducts research on transit trends, on-demand microtransit is “generally more expensive” to provide than traditional, fixed-route transit, and the extra subsidies it requires “may lead to inequitable allocation of service.”
Worse still, at a time when transit agencies desperately need more riders, TransitCenter advises agencies to “abandon the notion” that on-demand microtransit like those mentioned above can propel ridership growth — although the report points out microtransit can be useful in specific circumstances.
Other reports coming out about microtransit confirm flexible, on-demand microtransit is usually too expensive and inefficient for large cities, where large buses can carry more people along fixed routes more cheaply.
At the moment, TriMet shares that view. According to Tia York, TriMet’s public information officer, ride-hailing services “cost more money for every passenger because the vehicles carry fewer people and offer more customized trips. TriMet doesn’t offer these services because we can benefit more people more efficiently by investing in fixed-route services.”
But while tech-enhanced on-demand microtransit is new to a lot of American cities, there are similar, longstanding examples around the world that suggest there is something about microtransit that is worth considering. Hailable (that is, with your hands) minibusses operating on fixed routes have been popular in eastern Europe and Asia for decades. While many of these buses operate in regions where regular buses would struggle (think mountains), some big cities like Kyiv, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, and Paris also use minibusses.
Looking at those examples, it is clear agencies considering microtransit shouldn’t try to copy Uber or Lyft by providing “flexible service” but instead use new technology and more maneuverable vehicles to complement what already exists.
What might a better microtransit service look like?
What makes microtransit more appealing from a rider’s perspective is minibusses and vans don't get stuck in traffic as easily as bigger buses. That means faster trips and more reliable schedules. However, those benefits are at risk when riders can request pickup from anywhere, as every new rider can deviate the minibus from the shortest possible route.
Rather than provide flexible service in urban settings, TriMet should consider hailable minibusses to provide express service on its busiest routes for a slightly higher ticket price. One example of this kind of system can be found in Tel Aviv, where a regular bus costs about $2 to board while hopping on their minibus can cost around $5.
Tel Aviv’s minibusses usually follow the same routes as their big bus counterparts, although riders can hail them anywhere along the route. So three bucks can dramatically cut down travel times along busy streets as riders don’t have to walk extra distances to reach a bus stop, and these minibusses also use bus lanes.
Hailable minibusses would also be useful outside the densest parts of Portland, where flexible transit makes more sense. According to TransitCenter, on-demand microtransit can be successful in “areas with irregular street networks, hilly topography.” Transit Center cites Seattle’s King County Metro on-demand microtransit as an example, but TriMet already operates something similar in a few neighborhoods.
In an email, York explained Oregon’s HB 2017 funding package “provides funding for counties to operate shuttle services in areas that are difficult for TriMet to serve in a cost-efficient manner, but where there is demand, such as industrial areas.”
Examples of shuttle services operating in industrial areas include the Clackamas Industrial Shuttle and Multnomah County’s ACCESS Shuttle to the Columbia Corridor, but another such shuttle service (GroveLink in Forest Grove) is designed to “help the community access employment opportunities, medical appointments, shopping, other local destinations and regional transit services.”
The stage is already set for TriMet to start expanding those types of shuttle services in the suburbs and rural areas while experimenting with microtransit in urban neighborhoods. Not only is TriMet about to get its biggest cash injection in years, the agency recently built a new app where users can track regular buses as they move across the city and currently operates a few minibusses through its flexible, on-demand LIFT paratransit service, which riders hail via phone call.
On top of this, the Portland Bureau of Transportation has added new transit lanes, known as “Rose Lanes,” to some of the busiest streets in the region’s biggest city. According to York, TriMet already uses these lanes for LIFT vans, which make up the agency’s paratransit service, so it would not be a stretch to include minibusses among the vehicles that can use them to bypass traffic.
Transit has been defunded nationwide for decades. Paired with overbearing zoning restrictions eliminating walkable neighborhoods, that neglect has given Americans no choice but to use cars to access basic freedom of mobility — regardless of whether they can afford it. This created a perfect set of conditions for companies like Uber and Lyft to disrupt what little remained of public transportation in America’s most populous cities.
But rather than sealing the last nail in the coffin for transit, Lyft and Uber’s spiking user costs and their tendency to make congestion worse have shown communities across the country that private rideshares cannot replace public transportation’s efficiency and affordability. At the same time, these companies helped develop technology and consumer proficiency that transit agencies are now using to their advantage.
These agencies can, should and are pressing this advantage in creative ways across the country. It is an exciting moment for public transportation, but transit advocates should heed its first lesson: ridesharing was a disruptor, not the model. We don’t need to replace transit; we need to augment transit.
Moving Forward is a periodic column about new approaches to transportation, land use and systems planning prioritizing equity, climate change mitigation and climate justice.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
© 2022 Street Roots. All rights reserved. | To request permission to reuse content, email editor@streetroots.org or call 503-228-5657, ext. 40