Jersey City, N.J., Mayor Steven Fulop describes the city’s new on-demand transit service as “a huge success...even beyond our most ambitious expectations.”
The service, Via Jersey City, is a municipal-subsidized, on-demand rideshare network that is operated in partnership with Via. Despite launching just before the worst of the pandemic hit the East Coast in February 2020, the service has continuously achieved or exceeded the goals outlined by the city.
So how did this service become so successful?
Alex Lavoie, head of U.S. operations for Via, credits it to the city and mayor having clear, measurable goals in mind and understanding how this type of service model could achieve those goals.
The number one goal was to address transit deserts throughout the city by providing first- and last-mile connections. However, Mayor Fulop also outlined sustainability and environmental goals to reduce single occupancy vehicle trips.
"His vision aligned very well with the types of transportation services that we can provide,” Lavoie said.
Designing the Service
With everyone in agreement on the overall vision, the next step was figuring out how to design an effective on-demand service that would achieve the city’s goals.
The first task was to create service zones. Jersey City has two urban cores—one being the central downtown area that is rich in transit and densely populated and then the outer area of the city that is less populated and has fewer options for transit and connectivity. Keeping in mind the city’s goal of addressing transit deserts with first- and last-mile connections, the zones were created so that rides would not start and end within the central zone. Instead, a ride must originate in the outer zone (the less populated area) and end in the central zone (the more populated area) or vice versa.
“We had to set it up so that enough vehicles would be available every day to specifically serve those neighborhoods and not just be circulating around the area that didn’t have a dire need for them,” explains Barkha Patel, assistant business administrator for Jersey City.
To further promote first- and last-mile connections, Via worked with the city to establish a pricing scheme to encourage those types of trips. For instance, for people taking trips to one of the major transit hubs in the central zone, the fare is discounted compared to taking trips to other parts of the city.
“By offering that discount, we could encourage the first- and last-mile use case, which helped the city achieve some of its goals with the project,” Lavoie said.
With the service zones established, Via began using its in-house technology to help determine what kind of demand there could be for a rideshare service by plugging in demographic data, population density and so on into its simulation engine.
“[The simulation engine] helps run different scenarios for what a service could look like under different conditions,” Lavoie explained. “So, we'll take some of that demand prediction data, and we'll run it against different scenarios of the number of vehicles you have to provide a service, and test what the outcomes would look like for the riders with different fleet sizes.”
By running through multiple scenarios, the team agreed on a service design that would achieve the city’s primary goal of keeping wait times at or lower than 15 minutes for each ride. To accomplish this, the service launched with 15 Mercedes Metris minivans, complete with their own personal branding, and operated Monday through Friday from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
After landing on a service scenario with a designated number of vehicles, Via began to recruit drivers. An emphasis was placed on hiring locally and employing Jersey City residents per Via’s contract with the city. If that wasn’t possible, Via could look within Hudson County or that particular part of the state. Patel shares the city supported Via in this process by connecting them with local agencies that help with hiring and employment.
Once a driver is hired, Via completes background checks, onboards and registers the driver and provides training needed to operate within the Via system, as well as safety training. Additional training is provided to drivers who operate wheelchair accessible vehicles.
The last piece of the puzzle was to educate the community about the new service. This included not only telling people about the service but also how to use it, like how to download the app and how to book a trip. Patel explains this involved going to each neighborhood in the city to perform community outreach to ensure any concerns were addressed early on.
With everything in place, Via Jersey City was ready to make its debut as the state’s first on-demand public bus service. To ensure the service was achieving what it was intended to do, the city set specific key performance indicators to measure success. These included a ridership goal of 1,000 completed rides per week; an efficiency goal with a utilization rate of 2.5 (vehicles used per hour); and the quality-of-service goal of wait times at or lower than 15 minutes.
Using and Maintaining the Service
In the case of Jersey City, Via is providing its turnkey model.
“Jersey City is providing a lot of thought and guidance into how they want the service be designed, so they will provide input on things like the fare structure or the zones and will work with us to implement solutions that achieve those goals,” Lavoie said. “But in terms of the day-to-day operations, that's all managed on the Via side.”
By using Via’s technology, people can request a trip and be directed to a virtual bus stop. Via’s technology will match multiple passengers headed in a similar direction, helping reduce congestion and emissions while providing an efficient rider experience. Riders pay fares to Via and the remaining cost of operating the service is subsidized by the city.
Lavoie notes a big focus for the city was on creating an accessible service, whether that be affordable fares, ADA-compliant vehicles and stops, booking options for people without smartphones and payment options for unbanked individuals.
Fares are $2 per ride when going to or from the central zone or are $2.00 plus $0.50 per mile when traveling within the outer service zone. Rides can be booked using the Via mobile app or by calling a dedicated phone line. Those who need an accessible vehicle can indicate that at the time of booking. People can pay for their trips either with the mobile app or, in Jersey City’s case, with prepaid vouchers.
In terms of ensuring consistent ADA compliance, people who select a wheelchair vehicle will have door-to-door trips instead of having virtual bus stop pickups. For people directed to a virtual bus stop for pick up and drop off, the Via team reviews each stop in advance of launching a deployment to ensure safety and accessibility.
Lavoie explains not every corner is eligible to be a virtual bus stop. The Via team vets each corner by looking at traffic safety, lighting and adjacent crosswalks, to name a few determining factors.
“If we’ve made a choice in a virtual bus stop that a rider thinks can be improved, [then] we take that into account and we’ll improve the service over time using that feedback,” Lavoie said.
With this being a technology-driven service, safety and security include more than the physical environment and assets. Passenger information and data security are equally as important. Lavoie explains Via doesn’t retain any credit card information in its system, so no one at Via can access this information when people are booking rides.
“As it relates to other rider information, we have very restricted access to who can see a rider's profile information,” Lavoie said. “The only people at Via that can see that information are folks that are directly involved with supporting the riders for the service, and all of their access to any information is completely secure and password-protected within our backend system.”
Another big part of overseeing the day-to-day operations of the service is managing and maintaining the vehicle fleet. Currently, close to 10 percent of the fleet is electric. Patel says the city is working to fully electrify the fleet by February 2022.
But operating an electric fleet that has no fixed route or schedule comes with its own challenges. In addition to the typical infrastructure challenges, there’s the added hurdle of ensuring not all vehicles need to be taken off the road at once to charge.
“What you need to do is predict the times when it’s going to make the most sense for different vehicles to come off the road, so that you never have all your vehicles down at any given point in time,” Lavoie explained. “One of the things we’ve worked on is developing optimization algorithms to help decide when those electric vehicles should leave the road.”
Successfully managing the fleet is especially important in Jersey City’s case thanks to the high utilization rate of the service.
“Because of the strong demand and because of Via’s technology, we’ve been able to run a service that is quite efficient from a vehicle utilization perspective,” Lavoie said.
The vehicle utilization rate isn’t the only factor contributing to the service’s success. Within the first year of service, Via Jersey City has regularly met or exceeded the key performance indicators laid out by the city and has fulfilled the goal of providing better transit connections to people who need them most.
“[The service is] connecting residents that live in transit deserts that struggle with access to mass transit. We’re leveraging technology to deliver a better service than what could be there. And residents seem to be responding really well to it,” Mayor Fulop said.
Growing the Service
Patel credits the popularity of the program to the city’s clear vision of how the service could meet a need that had been there for so long. Within the first week of launching Via Jersey City, the city was receiving a lot of feedback from residents about wanting to travel to additional destinations. And even now, Patel says almost all feedback from residents is about wanting to add more vehicles, expand the system and increase hours and days of operation.
“The challenge is just that we need to keep expanding and making sure that there are funds in place to do that,” Patel said.
So far, the city has met this challenge.
“We started out with 15 vehicles as the initial launch for the entire city,” Patel said. “We saw very quickly that the ridership was significantly greater than what we had anticipated and what the fleet was able to handle. So, we added two vehicles.”
In September 2020, the city went through a more significant expansion, going from 17 vehicles to 26 vehicles. The city also expanded its service hours to include Saturdays from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Patel shares the city is now in its fourth stage of expansion where it is talking about once again increasing the size of the fleet, as well as considering adding Sunday services.
“We are getting great feedback from residents telling us that because of Via, they're now able to leave their personal vehicle at home and use Via to run errands, to travel around the city with their family and to do all of these things that otherwise would have been difficult or would have added to the number of vehicles on our narrow and limited street network,” Patel said.
Jersey City also does quarterly rider surveys to see what people are using the service, where people are taking their trips and when people are taking their trips. The city is also able to gather demographic data and income data. This helps the city determine if the service is achieving its goal of closing gaps in transit deserts.
“We’re seeing that a significant portion of riders are of minority communities, and we’re seeing trips originating and ending in the transit desert areas we had identified,” Patel said.
Lavoie adds that this data also allows Via to optimize vehicle locations, wait times and more efficiently aggregate passengers into a single trip. Plus, feedback from these surveys can also inform Via where to expand the service next.
In addition to demographic data, the city also breaks out riders based on the number of trips they take, separating very frequent riders (more than 100 rides) versus casual riders (about 10 to 50 rides). For some people, Via Jersey City has become part of their daily routine, and for others, it’s just another option for how to get to where they need to go.
“I’m starting to see a shift in how people are thinking and talking about using transportation around the city,” Patel said. “Now that we’re here, we fully intend on investing in this and continuing to expand.”
According to Jersey City’s Via performance reports, the service has steadily increased its weekly ridership, with the most recent data for the week of July 5, 2021, recording 9,051 completed rides. Trips include both work and leisure rides, as well as errands and connections to transit. More than a year into operation, the service is achieving exactly what the city set out to do.
“I think ultimately the design of the service really set it up for a lot of success because it was designed in a way that really was targeted at [meeting] the goals Jersey City was trying to achieve. [They had] a clear set of goals, a clear understanding of their city and a nuanced perspective on what they wanted to achieve,” Lavoie concluded.
