WATERLOO REGION — This veteran transit manager sees the future, and it’s on-demand.

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When Robin Gerus wanted to bring Guelph Transit to the leading edge of flexible and responsive service, he turned to the North American leader for on-demand transit, Waterloo-based RideCo.

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“As we were coming out of COVID, we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to try on-demand transit,” said Gerus, the general manager of Guelph Transit.

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Unlike conventional transit, on-demand transit has no fixed routes, schedules and stops.

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Passengers summon a transit vehicle using the app. They receive a message saying when and where the transit vehicle will arrive. The virtual stops can vary. If a lot of people in one area are booking rides, the app will send everyone to a mutually convenient location, such as a nearby parking lot.

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Gerus wanted to improve ridership on two routes known as “the community bus.” One circles the north side of the city, the other the south. He replaced them with a single, longer route with on-demand shuttles.

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After some regular passengers downloaded the app, and started to book rides from their smartphones, word quickly spread and ridership increased significantly.

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He set up a virtual bus stop at Claire Road East and Gordon Street where shuttle buses picked up people working in the Hanlon business park. The number of passengers quickly grew, and full-sized buses were soon needed.

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“Ridership grew like crazy,” said Gerus, and the on-demand service was replaced with a traditional-service fixed route into the business park within a year. “We saw an immediate increase and it kept on growing.”

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It was an unexpected, but welcome outcome — using on-demand transit to create a strong base of users for a traditional, fixed-route transit bus.

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On statutory holidays, Guelph Transit goes city-wide with on-demand service.

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“It is more efficient and people don’t have to wait an hour for service,” said Gerus.

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He believes on-demand transit will only expand in Guelph and everywhere else.

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“It is getting more and more popular every day,” he said. “People now understand: ‘I can take the bus when I want — I don’t have to wait for a stop at a specific time.’”

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Some smaller cities such as Cobourg, Ont., and Airdrie, Alta, have already adopted city-wide, on-demand transit year round. Calgary has issued a call for proposals for on-demand transit in select neighbourhoods after a successful three-year pilot. Ridership increased significantly with on-demand service.

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“Right now it is moving 910 passengers per vehicle-hour. For this type of system, in a low-density community, it is industry-leading,” said Prem Gururajan, co-founder and CEO of RideCo.

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RideCo’s technology is used by some of the biggest cities in North America, such as Los Angeles, which is expanding on-demand service with almost 100 vehicles in nine parts of the sprawling California metropolis. Philadelphia and the surrounding counties adopted RideCo for a paratransit system with 410 vehicles.

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“It is amazing to see this level of adoption,” said Gururajan.

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After eight years of building the cloud-based platform that operates on-demand transit, business increased sharply during the past two years.

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It is now used in cities big and small for regular passengers and for special needs passengers using paratransit, where the vehicles go to passengers’ homes. Some want to use on-demand transit to support traditional, fixed-route networks.

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Transit ridership plummeted during the pandemic, and transit services are adopting new tech to get riders back. The climate crisis is worsening, and all levels of government are investing in technology that reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

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Both trends are good for RideCo. It now has just over 100 employees working in the former Seagram Museum at Caroline and Erb streets in Waterloo.

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Most transit services across North America have adopted or are thinking about adopting some form of on-demand transit, said Gururajan.

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“The market has taken off dramatically in the past three years,” said Gururajan. “If you go back four years, maybe 10 per cent of transit agencies were looking at this technology. Now, it is 80-90 per cent — a huge shift in the marketplace.

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“Some small cities say, ‘We are going to go on-demand city-wide,’” he said. “Some big cities want to use on-demand transit to complement their fixed-route network.”

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Many years ago, Gururajan was inspired by his sister’s complaints about riding transit from Waterloo back to the family home in the Greater Toronto Area. Initially, he developed tech for ride-hailing and ride-sharing.

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But Gururajan followed the market to municipal transit agencies and paratransit operators. The tech is proving popular for moving passengers to bus stops on express routes or train stations.

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One app serves the different user groups and service models. Instead of buying regular-sized buses, cities can use smaller vehicles for on-demand transit.

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The smaller shuttles can pick up a passenger who uses a wheelchair at one stop, bring them to their destination, and then get called to picked up regular passengers waiting nearby. That has lowered costs and increased efficiencies.

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“By co-mingling the groups, everybody gets better services,” said Gururajan.

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RideCo has deployed its tech in more than 60 places, more than half of those since 2019.

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“We are growing like crazy right now, we have 40 per cent of the large American cities,” said Gururajan. “We have so many others in our pipeline.”