OSPE - The Voice - Fall 2020 - 31

INDUSTRY

The New Age of On-Demand
Transit in Canada

Dr. Willem Klumpenhouwer
Postdoctoral Fellow, Transit Analytics Lab, University of Toronto

martphones have enabled a wide range of mobility
options for Canadians. You can rent a scooter or a
bike, hail an Uber or a Lyft, or reserve a car share, all
with a few taps. These services are possible because
of the explosion of "the cloud", a tech-sector term for
using someone else's computing space, allowing businesses to focus
on their own priorities while leaving the computational power to
specialized companies.
In 2018, 88 per cent of Canadians reported having a smartphone,
and a 2020 figure estimates that 90 per cent of businesses run their
service in the cloud. Put smartphones and cloud computing together,
and you have the ingredients to create new mobility technologies
that were otherwise impossible.
These innovations are making their way into the transit realm.
Dozens of Canadian municipalities have turned to new on-demand
transit technology companies, many of whom are headquartered
in Canada, offering a new, more personalized form of transit.
Supported by Mitacs1 funding, OSPE partnered with the University
of Toronto's Transit Analytics Lab to co-supervise a research project
which surveyed 14 on-demand transit systems and vendors that
have appeared across the country since 2015. Many of these projects
introduced transit into towns and cities that previously had none.

The premise of on-demand transit is simple: In times and areas
with lower demand for transit, we can serve stops more efficiently
if we go directly to where and when people are waiting, instead
of following a pre-planned route and schedule. Traditionally, this
type of service has been done by phone, where you would quite
literally "dial a bus" and make a request for a trip, often hours or
even days in advance. Now, requests are made through an app on
your smartphone, and handled almost instantaneously.
In reality, there is a whole array of service types and
configurations for demand responsive transit services, as outlined
in Figure 1. Small vehicles that pool trips together but still provide
curb to curb service (often referred to as ride sharing) offer more
personalized service at a higher cost and lower efficiency. At the
other end of the spectrum is on-demand transit that looks more like
traditional fixed route transit, moving larger amounts of people in
larger buses, but less directly.
These applications are also able to provide transit agencies with
a lot of feedback and flexibility in service planning. Agencies can get
instantaneous reports about their service use and quality, both by
measuring trip lengths and wait times and through a rating system
that allows the customer to provide feedback on individual trips.
There is also adjustable service. Setting the vehicle capacity and

Mitacs is a not-for-profit organization that has designed and delivered research and training programs in Canada for 20 years. Working with 60 universities, 4000 companies, and both federal and provincial governments, they build partnerships that support industrial and social innovation in Canada.

Fall 2020 THE VOICE

OSPE - The Voice - Fall 2020

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