Innovations in Rural Public Transportation

Those of us living in America’s largest cities can now connect to myriad transportation services through the palm of our hand. Google maps and any number of tripplanning apps readily dish up information about the next bus or train, let one see whether the bus is wheelchair accessible, and even tell us how crowded a particular bus is. Rural public transportation, on the other hand, remains largely opaque and highly disconnected. But it doesn’t need to remain that way. The same technological advances that are ushering in a new travel paradigm in our cities are available to help rural systems modernize their services. I hail from Iowa, where I grew up riding Greyhound down highway 30 between my parents’ homes. After a fun-filled weekend with my dad, he’d put me and my sister on the bus, much preferring to leave the driving Sunday afternoons to a professional. I now live in the city, where I can take advantage of Metrobus service operating on 15-minute headways right outside my door, connecting me within 10 minutes to the DC metro system. From there, I can get to my office, shopping, restaurants, and any major city along the East Coast through intermodal connections to Amtrak and a host of bus companies. I think because of my early experience riding Greyhound and the local CyRide bus in Ames, I’ve always believed that the ability to live life fully without a car is something that should be available to everyone—not only people living in big cities, but people living in rural America as well. There is a lot of really exciting innovation happening in our industry right now and it gives me hope that my vision for seamless travel by public transportation will be realized.

EMBRACE UNIVERSAL MOBILITY AS A SERVICE

This is actually now a widely shared vision and the industry has a new name for it— Mobility as a Service, whereby our private transportation (i.e. our private cars) is replaced by a system where we can meet our transportation needs by summoning any variety of transportation services. And

there are some heavy hitters investing to make this happen. For instance, Uber is creating Uber as a Service, where the company’s customers can use the Uber App to hail an Uber, rent one of their bikes or scooters, and even compare those options with the cost and schedule of public transportation. Ford and Toyota are making similar investments, and any number of public transportation agencies now define themselves not solely as bus and train operators, but as mobility managers, helping customers navigate the multiple ways to get around their communities. I coined the term Universal Mobility as a Service (Figure 1) to emphasize the need to ensure that these new systems serve everyone, regardless of ability, age, income, or geography. How we go about creating these seamless networks of transportation services will determine the cost of travel and ultimately how equitable our transportation system will be. With so much rapid change happening right now in the transportation sector, we have a window of opportunity to address current inequities of our transportation system.

DATA STANDARDS: SOUNDS WONKY, BUT FOUNDATIONAL

Data standards are the underlying technology that enable seamless travel and support more equitable access. Data standards are nothing more than a standardized way to present information about a trip to facilitate data sharing

Figure 1: Key tenets of Universal Mobility as a Service, Source: AARP Public Policy Institute

and coordination among providers. Data standards define: • the fields of data, • how the information in each field is to be formatted, and • the order of operations in terms of the system taking those fields of data and doing something with them in a certain order. There are two primary types of data to be shared in a public transportation environment (Figure 2): • Discovery Data • Transactional Data

Figure 2: Discovery vs. transactional data, Source: AARP Public Policy Institute

DISCOVERY DATA

The General Transit Feed Specification, or GTFS is the underlying data standard for discovery data. Discovery data allow customers to find information about available travel options. There are now more than 500 transit agencies in the US that put their route and schedule information into this GTFS format and that give permission to Google Maps or other 3rd party app developers to offer this service information to transit riders. That in and of itself is really important, as lack of knowledge leads to lost customers. The Rural Transit Assistance Program is helping rural transit providers format their route and schedule data consistent with the GTFS so that their services become known to a wider audience and make travel easier to navigate. North American Bus Service providers are creating the National Intercity Bus Atlas

shown here with GTFS data. The lines and dots on this map represent scheduled intercity routes and stations, a system that logged 68.5 million trips in 2017 according to the National Household Transportation Survey. Joining route fragments onto a single map provides context. All of

a sudden, seemingly unrelated parts, when rendered as a whole, provide an understanding of the complete system and show how our nation benefits from intercity bus services. But as good as the GTFS is, it’s just Phase I of information sharing. The GTFS describes fixed routes with fixed schedules. That’s a problem when half of America’s transit service is delivered through demandresponsive transportation. We need a system that can describe more specialized services such as those common in rural America and those tailored to meet the needs of older adults and people with disabilities. The GTFS-Flex extension begins to do just that. It allows customers to view their demand-responsive transportation options. It also describes route deviated services, continuous stops (board anywhere), flag stops, point deviation, and point-to-zone services. It provides customers with a flexible itinerary that reflects service areas and service hours and with a description of the unique rules of the service. The Vermont Agency for Transportation was the first to develop a statewide GTFS-Flex trip planning tool using the OpenTripPlanner web app (Figure 3). Other transit agencies have followed suit. Why is this cool? Well, it allows community transportation to compete with other flexible shared-ride services. Uber and Lyft can afford to buy ads in Google Maps and appear as first/last mile connections. Small companies and public agencies cannot but should still be discoverable by their potential customers. The GTFS-Flex enables this to happen.

TRANSACTIONAL DATA

On the other side of the equation are transactional data, which allow a transportation provider and customer to make a transaction—be it to schedule a trip or to make a payment. For many rural services, it’s not enough to inform customers about the service. For them to take advantage of the service, the trip needs to be scheduled, a vehicle and driver dispatched, a fare paid, a subsidy reflected, a report made for the grant funder. This is what makes rural public transportation more complex than urban fixed-route services. For this there is a new data standard under development that is tailored to the unique needs of demand-responsive transportation. It’s called the Transactional Data Specification, published by the Transportation Research Board in 2020. The TDS allows the reservation systems of multiple community transportation providers to share customers and trip data among one another and as appropriate with brokerages. If one provider doesn’t have a vehicle or driver available when a customer requests a ride, that provider can post that trip in the system and another provider in the network can pick it up and provide the ride. That means fewer trip denials, fewer empty seats, and lower costs per passenger.

Figure 3: Vermont Trip Planner Generic, Source: Vermont Agency of Transportation

Other benefits include: • less staff time dedicated to manually coordinating and scheduling trips, • accurate billing-related data for trips, and, most important, better service for customers, such as same day rides and more reliable and punctual transportation. Unlike Uber’s Application Programming Interface, or API, the GTFS and TDS are all open and universal data standards, created through industry consensus and owned by no one and everyone. The TDS is modeled upon a data standard that has been in operation in Scandinavia for two decades and most prominently used in Denmark, where the scheduling systems of more than 550 private sector transportation providers interoperate with a publicly owned transit company to create a nationwide DRT system. This high quality service caters to the needs of people with disabilities and those traveling to medical appointments, but is open to the general public as well. Imagine a coordinated system in the United States that weaves together rural public transportation, ADA paratransit, and Medicaid non-emergency medical transportation. AARP funded the first proof-of-concept of the TDS. RideSheet was created by Full Path Transit Technology to address the needs of very small nonprofit transportation providers—those who operate fewer than a dozen vehicles. RideSheet puts scheduling in the Cloud using Google Suite of software (e.g., Google Sheets). And It integrates the TDS so that two or more providers can share trip data. The Minnesota DOT is integrating both GTFS and transactional data standards into its Greater Minnesota Mobility as a Service Platform. The project aims to integrate transit planning and ticketing with taxis, TNCs, van pool, and other modes. The pilot will bring together seven transit systems plus private providers in Southern Minnesota, including Jefferson Lines.

Via mobility services for seniors (Photo courtesy of the author)

THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORTATION

Universal Mobility as a Service can and must be the future of transportation. MaaS is coming, but rural and intercity public transportation could be left behind unless we are proactive. Without open and universal data standards, such as the GTFS and TDS, rural residents may not ever discover the service available in their community and could continue to confront fragmented services. If we commit to open and universal data standards we create a more competitive and equitable market where no single operator or software vendor owns the entire customer interaction, and where all riders see all options, including the best ones for them. We create a system where service doesn’t stop at the county border or require onerous paperwork to qualify a person, simply because we haven’t put in place the technology that can closely track trips for appropriate cost-allocation and billing. Many smart and committed people have already done tremendous work to lay out these systems. But it will take all of us to implement them, starting by demanding that software vendors use them. But if we make the effort, we will see the payoff in the form of a seamless, intermodal, interstate transportation system, one that is affordable and accessible to everyone. This is the Future of Transportation.

Recommended Resources

AARP Public Policy Resources on the Future of Transportation • Modernizing Demand-Responsive Transportation for the Age of New Mobility (a primer on the transactional data standard for demand-responsive transportation, including a section of the model FlexDanmark transportation system) • FlexDanmark video series • Universal Mobility as a Service • Mobility Managers Rural Transit Assistance Program GTFS Builder MobilityData (the organization that convenes GTFS stakeholders and hosts OpenMobilityData, a worldwide repository of GTFS datasets) TRB Research Report 210: Development of Transactional Data Specifications for DemandResponsive Transportation National Intercity Bus Atlas

Cover photo: Greyhound bus service in a rural area

About the Author

Jana Lynott

Jana Lynott is a Senior Strategic Policy Advisor with AARP Public Policy Institute’s Livable Communities team. As a researcher, writer, videographer, and keynote speaker, Jana brings to her work a passion for the role community design and transportation service play in the health and quality of life of people of all ages, abilities, and incomes. Her current research explores how “disruptive” technologies may influence the form and delivery of transportation services of the future.