The website Urban Toronto has published an update on the unique transit experiment in Innisfil Township in Simcoe County. It uses Uber service instead of a municipal-owned bus line. According to the UT article, the early results of the shared-cost system are encouraging. Between May 15 and July 15, the first two months the pilot was in operation, Uber undertook 4,868 subsidized trips, or an average of 79 trips per day. A report presented to Council detailing the initial results of the pilot concluded that “[t]he total costs after two months have been $26,462.41 for the town’s ridesharing transit service, while there would have been a $270,000 start-up net cost for one bus and $610,000 for two buses running along routes servicing only a small portion of the town.
BUS SYSTEM WOULD HAVE COST MORE
This strongly indicates that the cost of a fixed-route bus system to service all of Innisfil would have been far greater and a less convenient option than through the current ridesharing transit service.” The Town has yet to publicly provide another update on the pilot’s ridership numbers. Another advantage of this program is the data collection and analysis component. Unlike the vast majority of transit systems, which obtain ridership data through a combination of Automatic Passenger Counters (APCs), manual counts, and smart payment cards (Presto Card in the GTHA), Innisfil will have access to complete origin-destination data through Uber — Urban Toronto
