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Public transportation provides a fixed route where people stand in line and wait on schedule. Bus drivers pick up and drop passengers in designated areas, bringing people to their workplaces, shopping centers, and anywhere they want to go.
However, the transport system has markedly evolved with the advent of digital technology, from crowded buses and railway systems to microtransit transportation systems. In the new normal, microtransit promises greater advantages to modern people. But what’s microtransit and how can people’s lives improve from availing such service?
In this article, you’ll learn more about the best ways people can benefit from microtransit.
1. Empower Transportation and Better Ridership
A microtransit platform empowers on-demand transportation systems, improving ridership, providing better service, and connecting communities. It enables the world’s leading transit agencies and transportation companies.
But what’s microtransit? Microtransit refers to shared transit utilizing small-scale vehicles such as regular cars, minibuses, and shuttles, delivering convenient public transportation. Here’s how microtransit can help improve better ridership:
- On-Demand Transportation or Per Request: This mode of transportation can be subsidized (private) and operated on a fixed-route model or on-demand. Using a smartphone or tablet, passengers can request a ride under on-demand microtransit.
- Saves Time and Effort: Say goodbye to long queues waiting for a ride, going to work, or going home by simply requesting a microtransit ride using your smartphone. There’s no need to walk to the designated pickup points because you can request to be picked up right in your house, saving so much time and energy.
- Great Customer Service: Provide an excellent customer experience. Because passengers and vehicles are geo-localized (located via GPS), ride bookings are real-time. Also, everyone can enjoy cashless payments and guaranteed seats.
- Tailored Transpo Services: Passengers can get personalized service than traditional methods without paying that much like luxury car rentals.
2. Higher ROI for Transportation Businesses
Are you into the transportation business? If you’re a transport operator, transform your business and embrace microtransit for a higher return of investment. Shifting your transportation business into microtransit brings promising benefits business-wise. It’s high time to adopt advanced technology to gain higher ROI.
Here’s how microtransit can increase your investment return:
- Predictive Dispatching: Streamline your operations with automated dispatching. With predictive dispatching, driving efficiency increases, reducing the costs associated with traditional transport operations.
- Automatic Trip Brokering: Microtransit platforms offer high-quality, flexible transportation services at the lowest cost, enabling automatic trip brokering to providers.
- Seamless Integrations: Using ride-booking apps that your customers love, they can be integrated with a microtransit platform in a breeze. Business owners don’t need to learn complex technical aspects of microtransit because the platforms are easy to manage.
- Seamless Monitoring: Transportation businesses can monitor ROI seamlessly in one interface with a microtransit platform’s help. Microtransit providers can also generate a report as per request. This digital-based transport system ensures accurate data across all points for businesses and riders alike.
3. Resolve People with Disability Mobility Needs
Not everyone can have access to traditional public transportation. People with disabilities, including vulnerable populations such as senior citizens and young children, need convenient and safe transportation. They’re the ones highly at risk of infection, slips, falls, and accidents.
While mobility assistive devices and features are available in public buses, microtransit services make the lives of people with disabilities a lot easier. They can request to be picked up in a specific location, reducing their effort moving around dangerous streets.
4. Healthy and Safe Commuting
Viruses and other microorganisms are mutating and evolving too with time, making public transportation more challenging. Crowded buses, railways, and traditional transport systems pose health and safety hazards. Now more than ever, everyone needs a healthy and safe mode of transportation because the traditional, crowded commuting methods increase the risk of COVID-19 exposure.
Here’s how microtransit makes a safe mode of transportation:
- Proof of Transportation: With microtransit services, people can determine the driver’s details, providing a safety layer when commuting. Passengers can provide proof of transportation to their workplaces for fare allowance reimbursement.
- Easy Contact Tracing: With microtransit, a person can ride alone or with a family or friend, depending on preference. Passengers have peace of mind going to work or going home because of less chance of being exposed to strangers who might be carrying disease-causing airborne or droplet nuclei microorganisms, especially during this time of COVID-19 pandemic.
- Peace of Mind: People can request a ride to go their intended destination without worrying too much about their safety. Passengers can send proof of transportation to their loved ones by taking a screenshot using their smartphones.
5. Environmentally Friendly Transportation
Microtransit connects modern people to buses and trains, connecting them to convenient transportation. Hence, helping reducing carbon footprint and promoting greener public transportation. Microtransit is the future’s eco-friendly public transport solution.
Check the following reasons why microtransit makes environmentally-friendly transportation:
- Reduced Private Vehicles on The Road: Microtransit works by using a downloadable booking app to book a trip, usually for buses. But with the increasing demand for microtransit services, shuttles and cars are also used, decreasing people’s need to buy and drive private cars. This shared public transport eliminates the crowding of vehicles on the road.
- Fuel Efficiency: With increased driving efficiency, people get to their desired destination faster and with less gas and miles consumed. Microtransit drivers use GPS technology to monitor traffic, avoiding crowding busy streets and highways, reducing added pollution with vehicle gas emissions.
Conclusion
Microtransit involves using digital technology to implement convenient and on-demand shared transportation to the public. Transport business owners can benefit from using a microtransit platform, increasing driving efficiency and lowering operating costs. It’s an environmentally friendly transport system, eliminating single-occupancy cars on the road.
For passengers, microtransit enables them to request a ride anytime and anywhere using their mobile devices, benefiting people with disabilities tremendously. This mode of transportation provides a healthy and safe way to get to the destination without fear of contracting viruses or any other disease-causing microbes brought about by crowded public transportation systems.
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