GO joins Milton Transit to test new door-to-door bus service

Commuters can avoid parking hassles and book a lift from their front door or a neighbourhood meeting spot to the GO station for less than $1.95.

Thestar.com
March 24, 2015
By Tess Kalinowski


If you could book a low-cost door-to-door lift to the GO station every morning, would you leave your car at home?

Faced with an overflowing GO parking lot and gaps in the local bus service, the town of Milton and Metrolinx are each spending $125,000 to find out.

On April 13, Milton will launch a year-long trial of a new app that transit officials hope will persuade GO commuters to leave their cars in the driveway and optimize the town's fledgling bus service.

The app, called RideCo, was developed by Waterloo startup Transit Labs. It will enable commuters to use a computer or mobile device to book a ride to the station in the morning and a lift home in the evening.

Commuters will know how much they're going to pay for their ride - the town says $1.95 is the maximum - at the time they reserve a lift.

"It might be 15 minutes ahead, it might be two weeks ahead," said Matthew Monteyne, of Transit Labs.

The system can build in options, he said. Riders willing to walk to a street corner to meet other people, for example, might pay less.

The app also alerts riders when the bus or car is coming and again when it arrives at their home or stop.

"It's not a milk run. We have a maximum length they'll be in the car," said Monteyne, although he didn't provide specifics on Tuesday.

"We're built from the ground up for personalized mass transit. We're designed around moving as many people and (car)sharing as many people as we can, so that has a dramatic impact on costs and the number of people we can move," he said.

"We had a gap in our services, and we thought this was an innovative approach to fill that gap," said Milton Transit co-ordinator Tony D'Alessandro, adding that the pilot will be used in the morning and evening rush hours.

The 16-bus Milton fleet can't provide timely service to all outgoing GO trains in the morning, so this is an option that will make sure there's a bus - in some cases a taxi - available to get customers to the train in time, he said.

Standard morning buses will still operate on the GO-subsidized 65-cent fare, said D'Alessandro.

But RideCo will replace the three smaller buses that normally meet the last Milton train in the evening at 8 p.m. Drivers on those three buses are each assigned a different zone, and they develop a route based on each day's riders' destinations.

RideCo will automate that function, calculating the most efficient routes, sometimes crossing zone boundaries. If a rider is going to a remote location, a taxi could supplement the bus.

"We're considered a bedroom community, so we're looking for the province to help us out and increase our transit service. If this is one way, I'm more than happy to support it," said Milton Councillor Mike Cluett, who joked that he's just happy Metrolinx finally figured out where Milton is.

The dial-a-ride-style program won't be enough, however, to seriously enhance transit for Canada's fastest growing municipality, he said. The town, which has grown from about 12,000 to 105,000 people in the past decade, needs more trains and two or three more GO stations, said Cluett.

Milton GO service is a sore point with many riders, who complain that all 1,000 parking spots have been snapped up by 7 a.m., many of them by commuters who drive in from Kitchener and Cambridge, said Councillor Colin Best, who called the pilot "a glorified taxi."

"We've got some concerns in terms of getting to the GO station because there is so much traffic in and out," he said, adding that another track and more trains, as well as additional parking, would make a real difference.

But right now capacity is limited because CP, which owns the Milton line, uses it for freight.

Meantime, D'Allesandro said, the town's own transit service is growing. In 2006, Milton's four bus routes provided about 85,000 rides. Last year, it had eight routes that carried 410,000 rides.

GO service has grown, too. There are now nine trips each way on the line.

D'Allesandro said about a quarter of the riders who use the Milton station are from the Cambridge and Kitchener area.