Rideshare test falls short of the mark
Project fails to get more residents to take transit
WATERLOO — A pilot project between University of Waterloo researchers and Grand River Transit has shown it’s a challenge to get people in suburbs out of their cars and onto transit.
The study took place in the Laurelwood, Beechwood, Erbsville and Vista Hills suburbs of Waterloo, where bus service is limited and ridership is low. Researchers created dozens of virtual stops where, for the price of a bus ticket, people could take ride share to a transit stop and transfer for free onto the bus.
The study was meant to test if using creative solutions like ridesharing would convince more residents to take transit, said Chris Bachmann, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Waterloo. “For sustainability reasons, we would want to increase transit use and decrease total automotive travel,” he said. Results were mixed.
On the plus side, about twothirds of the 600 people who tried it used the project to get to bus stops.
But overall usage was very low. About 36 people board a bus every hour on a regular GRT route. The goal of the test was to generate seven boardings an hour, but even after service improvements, that only rose to 1.6 boardings an hour. Grand River Transit cancelled the project at the end of 2019.
Most users didn’t use the system to get to the nearest bus stop, as hoped. Sometimes they went to bus stops with multiple bus routes, or express routes. But about 20 per cent of the time, they used rideshare to go from one bus stop to another, suggesting some users used it as a cheap taxi ride to their destination, bypassing transit altogether.
The pilot showed that integrating transit with other options can bring people to bus stops, Bachmann said. “The challenge now is designing an integrated system to make it work as well as possible.”
Tweaks such as limiting the length of rideshare trips could eliminate those problems, Bachmann said. It’s a balancing act, he said.
“If you restrict it too much, people will say, ‘Forget about it.
I’m just going to drive.’ ”
The pilot was a learning experience, said John Cicuttin, manager of transit development at the Region of Waterloo.
“We continue to explore and try to find innovative solutions for low-demand areas.”