Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (L.A. Metro) has awarded RideCo a $28-million, three-year contract to provide technology and services for the launch and operation of on-demand transit in six designated service zones in Los Angeles County.
"We are thrilled to partner with L.A. Metro to launch this innovative new mode of public transit that will provide an improved customer experience for riders and increase transit ridership," said RideCo CEO Prem Gururajan. “Most of the funds for this project will be invested in Los Angeles County to fund next-generation transit technology jobs in the United States."
Additional funding was also approved for operational expenses and to hire new L.A. Metro employees to operate the vehicles.
"RideCo is building the world's next-generation transit technology, capable of adapting to the dynamic needs of the future and evolving demographics," said Gururajan.
In the procurement report, L.A. Metro deemed RideCo to be "the industry's top performers in the field of MicroTransit including specialists in software development, modeling and analytics" and found that RideCo's approach "supports the backbone of public transit (the agency's bus and rail network)."
This award follows an almost two-year competitive procurement process that included two stages and drew upon insights and expertise from more than 450 staff from all departments at L.A. Metro. RideCo's team worked closely with L.A. Metro staff and municipal stakeholders to design service models which support the agency's goals, including providing high quality shared mobility options and enhancing communities and lives through mobility and access to opportunity. After more than a year of extensive assessment of the bidders' technologies and capabilities, RideCo was announced as the sole winner of Part B, the implementation of L.A. Metro's microtransit project. RideCo says it outscored the two other finalists in the procurement in every technical evaluation category of the procurement.
While the six microtransit zones will launch in phases throughout 2020-2021, RideCo says this 100-plus vehicle project will be the single largest on-demand public transit service in existence once at full scale.
