Congratulations! You’ve decided to pursue microtransit for your agency. Now what?
Technology is important but so is the team of people you choose to work with for bringing to to life. You want to work with a vendor—preferably one that acts as a partner and measures your success as theirs. We’ve created a guide specifically to arm agencies with the questions needed to make a thorough evaluation.
Here’s a sneak peek at some of the questions in A Human’s Guide to Shopping for Microtransit.
Motives
- How do the vendor’s offerings help transit agencies be more successful and deliver a better experience to their riders? Try to uncover whether the company is directly competing for riders with agencies or helping agencies to grow.
- Is the vendor a transportation network company (TNC) today or planning to be one in the future? Could they become a competitive threat to ridership?
Experience
- How many microtransit projects has the vendor piloted and deployed, and does the vendor have successful microtransit customers they can reference?
- Has the vendor worked with another transit agency to solve for your specific use case(s), and can they share actual examples and data of simulations and pilots they have run for those use cases?
Simulations
- Does the vendor provide lab-based simulations? Will your simulation model run on the actual operational system for routing and scheduling or is it separate simulation software?
- What kind of services does the vendor offer to help guarantee the success of your microtransit pilot? Will the vendor work with you through the pilot (and beyond) to do the data analysis using the actual live service data and provide consulting services to optimize the service over time?
To get the complete list of questions, download our Guide to Shopping for Microtransit.