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Similar to Uber’s platformisation of the taxi industry a decade ago, cities and startups around the world are trying to give mass transit a digital facelift with on-demand, flexible-route bus services. But they’re all struggling.
According to a recent piece in Wired, “on-demand buses have been a thing for decades. Public transit agencies often call them demand-responsive buses, and deploy them to serve users who lack easy access to standard routes because they live especially far away, or may have special needs.”
But the problem is, “because they reach relatively few people, they’re expensive to operate. They’re inefficient too, often making riders wait undetermined amounts of time for a ride.” Pilots are operating in cities from Shanghai and Sydney to Helsinki, and they’re “not finding a lot of success.”
But the problem is, “because they reach relatively few people, they’re expensive to operate. They’re inefficient too, often making riders wait undetermined amounts of time for a ride.”
Despite their financial turmoil — and all the negative side-effects of Uberthat we’re now well acquainted with — it’s still difficult to gauge whether this more public form of transit-sharing would be a good thing or a bad thing for transport systems.
Years ago CityLab published a balanced rundown of the bright and dark sides of microtransit, weighing up increased overall transit riders against new transit competition for already-impoverished public systems and increased mileage and congestion for cities.
As for whether they’ll be able to iron out the creases of their financial models, it’s useful again to look back at microtransit’s ride-hail predecessors. According to Forbes, “the taxi industry that Uber is seeking to disrupt was never profitable when allowed to expand in unregulated markets — and Uber’s current business model doesn’t fundamentally change these structural industry characteristics.”
Jarrett Walker says that “we’re seeing the same thing on the microtransit side. So far, microtransit is doing no better than demand-responsive transit has always done, generally worse than 3 passenger trips per driver hour, compared to 10 for the typical outer suburban fixed and 20-100 for fixed routes in dense and walkable places.” He concludes neatly, saying that “It’s a fact about the intrinsic spatial inefficiency of demand-responsive service, which has little to do with the communications tools used.”
At the end of the day, public transit only makes for a thriving business model under very specific conditions, and as we’re learning from countless failed microtransit experiments, adding a polished digital interface might not be enough to change that.
