Popular in cities, transit trip planning and payment apps are slowly coming to rural communities

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder.

Transportation planners in Vermont and Minnesota are working to bring rural transit riders the same app features that urbanites have been enjoying for almost a decade.

The initiatives, which Vermont began in 2018 and Minnesota began in 2023, are both part of federally-funded pilots, and will allow rural users to plan and pay for call-ahead public transit rides via web and mobile apps.    

Public Transit Looks Different in Rural Communities

For years, city dwellers have had access to an array of apps, such as Apple Maps and Google Maps, to plan their public transportation trips. These options are more readily available in urban areas because of how public transit in urban areas works: transit agencies run fixed routes, and their schedules change infrequently. Some transit agencies also run these schedules into a feed, which developers incorporate into trip planning apps. These feeds give users the ability to track the exact location of transit vehicles within the app. 

In most rural areas, public transit looks a little different. Rural transit agencies generally do not have consistent schedules. In fact, most schedules — and consequently, the routes buses operate — change daily based on whoever calls-in for a ride. Rural transit agencies also often lack the resources to build a feed that developers could integrate into their trip planning apps. 

The variable and underappreciated nature of rural public transit systems is why both Minnesota and Vermont decided to develop their own trip planning websites for rural areas. “The trip planner really started with the idea that we can connect better to our rural communities if people could know what type of … [transit] existed outside of fixed routes,” said Vermont Agency of Transportation planner Dan Currier. 

Using Apps to Plan Rural Trips

In building trip planners, both Vermont and Minnesota worked with Trillium Transit to compile the start, end, travel times, and paths of every trip their dial-a-ride systems have completed. These trips were, and continue to be, analyzed by web and mobile apps like Transit to calculate itineraries. Rural riders in Vermont and Minnesota can use either the web-based trip planner their state has developed, or the Transit mobile app to plan their trips. 

Uptake of Vermont’s trip planner has been strong. Users generated over 76,000 itineraries between November 2022 and mid-November 2023, with 14,463 of those itineraries involving planning a transit trip. Other trips users planned involved walking and biking itineraries, as well as matches with vanpools and carpools. Vermont planners saw the most rural usage of their transit planner in Washington County, which encompasses Montpelier, the state’s capital. 

Data on how many itineraries Minnesota’s trip planner has generated since it launched in March is currently unavailable. However the University of Minnesota, which is partnering with MnDOT to research whether rural trip planner travel tools affect rural residents’ use of public transit, is pursuing this information. 

Meanwhile, Minnesota transportation planners are seeing the most rural usage of the Transit app among those who use the Otter Express, one of the participating dial-a-ride providers which operates in Fergus Falls, Breckenridge, and Perham, communities in western Minnesota. 

Paying In-App in Minnesota

Minnesota’s pilot program includes a mobile fare payment component, another feature long afforded to urban transit riders. In addition to user convenience – particularly the fact that anyone can buy a ticket using the app without an internet connection – contactless fare payment may also save money for transit agencies. MnDOT believes transit agencies nationwide spend 10-15% of the fares they collect processing them, which includes counting the cash and taking it to a bank. Token Transit, the vendor that MnDOT and participating rural agencies are using as part of their pilot program, collects just 8% from fare sales. 

However, Kayla Sullivan, director of rural Minnesota’s Otter Express transit system, doesn’t agree that in-app payment will truly save money for her agency.“It is a cost when we count cash as employees have to physically count the currency and that takes time, and it is also a cost for an employee to gather the data on any app purchases. To give you one answer, I would say it is cheaper for us to take cash payments,” she said. 

Wendy Clark, a resident of Fergus Falls in northwestern Minnesota, doesn’t see the benefit of using an app for transit fare either. 

“I have no problem paying $2.00 [in dollar bills] one way. I also have dollar bills with me,” said Clark, who rides the Otter Express. “Most elderly people that ride the bus do not have cell phones and only carry cash. The money boxes are always full of dollar bills!” 

Additionally, cell phones don’t do well during extremely cold winter weather. They can be hard to use when people are wearing gloves, and can die prematurely as their battery lives are reduced by the cold. 

Even as cell phone manufacturers are constantly releasing new models with longer battery life, having to hold a phone out just before getting on a bus doesn’t sit well with Clark. “It is too cold to have your hands out in the cold,” she said. 

Challenges Remain

Vermont’s pilot, which was deployed with a $480,000 grant from the Federal Transit Administration’s Mobility on Demand Sandbox grant, ended in 2020. But they continue to pay $150,000 annually to maintain the feeds and the trip planner website. “We … continued to provide the trip planning service because of the value we saw in it,” said Currier, the Vermont Agency of Transportation planner. He wants the tool to help the state’s transit agencies restore all of their pre-pandemic public transit ridership by next year.

Minnesota also received support from the federal government to deploy their project. The project, which launched in March and is expected to end in late April 2024, is funded in part by a $628,000 federal grant. The total cost of the project, $1.9 million, also includes the pilot project for riders to pay their fares via a mobile device. MnDOT is not sure if, or how, they will continue the program when the pilot ends. 

Due to limited funding, not every rural Minnesota transit agency is participating in the trip planner and fare payment pilot. “The agencies available on the Transit app are those that committed to work with MnDOT on this project,” said MnDOT spokesperson Joseph Palmersheim. “Transit agencies … [that] were both interested in participating and had the capacity to work on the project.”

These initiatives face other challenges, too. The Transit app, for example, isn’t able to calculate trip plans longer than 186.4 miles. A representative from the Transit app says it is designed to facilitate “local” travel. And for all Vermont and most participating Minnesota agencies, riders looking to get a ride through the trip planner website or the Transit app still need to make a call because they cannot book online, though Transit app users can press a button in the app that will automatically dial a number to connect them with a dispatcher to schedule a ride. 

“There was some integration between the vendors that was too difficult to overcome,” said Currier. “And so we came up with an easier solution than trying to do a direct booking through the trip planner. [It’s] not ideal, [but] it was the best we could do.”

Minnesota’s online trip planner allows users to book rides from two rural agencies: Otter Express, and Rolling Hills Transit, which serves southeastern Minnesota. However, unreliable internet access and cell phone service, seemingly perennial challenges for rural communities, do affect how one can pay a fare. Token Transit requires an internet connection for users to purchase tickets. However, it does not require an internet connection for a rider to be able to show their purchased ticket to the driver. 

Lack of internet access also seems to affect how one can plan a trip on public transit. Though the Transit app allows users to plan fixed-route trips offline using schedules the app saves to their phone, it does not allow users to plan dial-a-ride trips without an internet connection. The University of Minnesota and the Federal Transit Administration are researching how big a role the lack of internet and cell phone access plays in whether or not rural residents use the trip planning and fare payment apps.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.