Residents of the Canadian city have developed a "Uber-service" with buses, not cars

In many cities there is public transport, but, unfortunately, his work leaves much to be desired. The problem can be solved by your own car (not always), taxi or Uber or similar service. As it turned out, there is another solution - the bus "service", which operates on the principle of Uber.

On-demand transport system, created with the assistance of the municipality of the city , really works on request. And this is not just a concept, but a real project, which started on September 17 in Canada. The city where it all works is called Belleville (Belleville, not to be confused with the district of Paris).

You can order public transport by phone or in a special application, a few days before the trip, and a few minutes. If all is well, the bus is free, the user receives an automatic confirmation along with the time of arrival of the bus.
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So far, the bus travels only in the evenings and at night, during the day service is not available. According to the city administration, the decision is just great. The fact is that in the usual situation the buses move along the usual routes, no matter if there are passengers or not.

But in the framework of the pilot project, buses very rarely drive along the roads “empty”. Before the start of the project, the bus usually transported 40-45 people per night. This is a lot, but most of the time the vehicle drove empty. After the opportunity to call the bus appeared, the number of passengers more than doubled. Now over night the bus carries about 100 passengers. Thus, the system has become more efficient.

The service works automatically thanks to software developed by a company from Toronto - the dispatcher is simply not needed. Buses are not autonomous, everything works as usual with a driver. But routes are formed by themselves automatically, they are determined by the users of the service themselves.

According to software developers for this project, sparsely populated regions are difficult to maintain using public transport systems - they cost a lot and their efficiency is low. The way out, according to the authors of the idea, is to limit the number of vehicles on the line, and the line itself may not be a permanent route, it is formed “on request”. Different people ride buses to different areas of the city, route numbers are not needed in this case.

The Canadian system allows the city to spend less resources, getting more than usual return. “The service gives us the opportunity to work on a larger area, carrying more passengers, while spending less time on driving, saving both the resources of the bus itself,” said one of the project representatives. He hopes that the city administration will extend the project after the end of the pilot period.

Belleville problems are common in small communities. Municipalities do not have free resources to run full-fledged bus routes, since due to the low concentration of the population they need to be made very long. In this case, passengers are usually at a minimum, as already mentioned above.

In some cases, the municipality replaces buses with the Uber service , as they did, for example, in Ontario, USA, in one of the small towns. The local administration provided full support for Uber, which makes the service a plus even with a minimum number of orders.

Another interesting project was launched in Austin, Texas, USA. The city authorities decided to try out a scheme that is similar to the one used in Belleville. The project is called Pickup . Now the main task of the project is to determine whether it is possible to do without regular routes with a predetermined pattern of movement around the city.

In Austin, residents can call transport, drive to the bakery shop, and on the same transport to return. And this is not a taxi in the usual sense of the term. There are already the first results of the project - for example, more passengers use the same bus to travel in a certain area of ​​the city. This allows you to increase the efficiency of operating vehicles and reduce costs per passenger.