Ep. 118: Road Scholars on Microtransit with Michael Hyland

Transit agencies are using microtransit services to increase the reach and access of their overall service. We talk with Mike Hyland about how agencies can think about pricing and fleet sizing to balance cost and service. Also, how should agencies measure the overall success of their microtransit services?

Show notes:

• Hyland, M., Saha, R., & Hu, S. (2026). Peak Pricing and Transfer Discounts Can Make Microtransit More Efficient. UC Office of the President: University of California Institute of Transportation Studies. http://dx.doi.org/10.7922/G2HT2MPD
• Saha, Ritun and Hu, Siwei and Hyland, Michael, Optimal Fare Policy and Fleet Sizing for an Integrated Fixed-Route Transit and Microtransit System (August 02, 2025). Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5382012 
• Hyland, M., Watkins, K., Shaheen, S., & Martin, E. (2026). What Should Agencies Measure to Decide If Microtransit Is Working? UC Office of the President: University of California Institute of Transportation Studies. http://dx.doi.org/10.7922/G2ZW1JBF
• Hyland, M. F; Pike, S.; Hu, S.; Berkel, J.; Xing, Y.; Saha, R., et al. (2024). Integrating Microtransit Service with Traditional Fixed-Route Transit Costs More but Greatly Improves Access to Jobs. UC Office of the President: University of California Institute of Transportation Studies. http://dx.doi.org/10.7922/G2TH8K2W
• Slosky, J., Silver, F., Schuchard, J., Schuchard, R., and Welsh, D. (2022) Microtransit definitions, trends, and applications. Calstart https://calstart.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/CALSTART-Microtransit-Overview.pdf
• Miriam Pinski, Anne Brown, Nicholas Perloff-Giles (2026). Is microtransit a cost-effective alternative or a costly competitor to public transit?, Cities,Volume 169, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2025.106490.

Transcript

Madeline Brozen 00:00:06
Hello, this is the Housing Voice podcast and I'm Madeline Brozen. I'm your host on this episode of Road Scholars, the transportation interlude on Housing Voice. 

In today's episode we are talking about microtransit with Mike Hyland. Microtransit is a new tool in transit agencies' toolkits that lets people arrange an on-demand point-to-point ride. Think of it like an Uber in a van provided by a transit agency. Mike's work has examined many aspects of microtransit. We're going to talk with him about what this service is, how much it should cost and how to think about measuring success. I went to this conversation as a bit of a skeptic, but I found it helped me better understand this topic, which is increasingly used by public transit agencies. 

Thanks again to our sponsor for this year's Road Scholars Series: Transfers Magazine. Transfers is part of the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center. I encourage you to go check out more of their material at transfersmagazine.org. 

The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Shane Phillips, Claudia Bustamante, Brett Berndt and Tiffany Lieu. This is our last Road Scholars episode in this year's miniseries, so thanks for joining us. If there are more transportation topics you'd like to discuss or guests you want to hear from. Please make sure to let us know. With that, let's get to our conversation with UC Irvine's Mike Hyland. 

Mike Hyland is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, where he works on modeling, analysis and design of transportation systems. He focuses on emerging transportation systems. So your bike share, ride share, autonomous vehicles, integrating these services with existing transit networks. Mike, welcome to Road Scholars.

Michael Hyland 00:02:10
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Madeline Brozen 00:02:11
My typical co-pilot, Juan Matute, is on vacation today, on his own road trip, I believe. So I have pulled in Mike Manville, one of our Housing Voice cohorts. Welcome to Road Scholars, Mike.

Mike Manville 00:02:23
Happy to be here.

Madeline Brozen 00:02:24
So we start each episode of Road Scholars in the same way, where we ask our guests to share a memorable transportation experience, one that brought joy, mystery, disaster, whatever comes to mind. What memorable journey would you like to share with our listeners today?

Michael Hyland 00:02:38
I'm going to talk about the first car I purchased and the adventures I went on with it. So I was a rising senior in undergrad at Cornell University, where I knew Professor Manville at the time, And I co-purchased a 1999 Concorde with 148,000 miles on it for $1,200.. So $600 for me, $600 for my friend. We wanted it for senior year for, you know, fun activities and such. But I had an internship down in Baltimore that summer, working construction, which is another story but I won't get into it today. And well, the car was in okay shape- not great- And I got the tires replaced in Pittsburgh, where I'm from, drove the vehicle down to Baltimore, noticed it was shaking a good bit at various times, particularly on the turns, and then about a week and a half later, I'm driving home from work and I start hearing these what you know? I don't have much experience with gun noises, but what sounded to me like gunshots boom every two to four minutes. After I hear three of them, I realized that my, it's my lug nuts. They're shooting off the car as I'm on the on the highway and—

Mike Manville 00:03:45
Oh God.

Michael Hyland 00:03:46
Then eventually my one of my wheels goes up into the wheel. Well, as I'm still on the freeway, lucky enough it was pretty close to an exit and I was able to get off. My dad saved me, you know, purchased what's? The AAA service. They came and towed me in about 98 degrees Fahrenheit weather in Baltimore in the summer, So it was not a pleasant experience. The car didn't have air conditioning to begin with, so that didn't help. So yeah, I kind of learned the hard way about. You know, private vehicles aren't always as reliable as you'd like them to be, And car mechanics, even if they're your family friends, also aren't. The most was reliable.

Madeline Brozen 00:04:19
Well, I mean, sounded like a deal, but also sounds like a little bit of. You get what you pay for in that one.

Michael Hyland 00:04:26
It did, It did.

Madeline Brozen 00:04:27
Well, today we're talking about a little bit larger vehicles than a private car. We're going to talk about microtransit, what it is, how it's used and how this type of service can be designed to best complement existing transit service. I will say that I am coming to this topic really as a microtransit skeptic, but it was actually really hearing your work, Mike, that made me think about how there's real opportunity in this to be part of kind of the transportation ecosystem, And so I figured it'd be a great chance to have this conversation about your work, help educate people on the promises and perils. So, with the support of the University of California Institute of Transportation Studies, and alongside a team including Susan Shaheen, Susie Pike, Carrie Watkins and a group of graduate student researchers- Ritun Saha, Siwei Wu, Yang Shang, Jacob Burkle, Jeffrey Van Der Veen- Mike and his team are examining how microtransit can complement traditional public transit. We'll probably call it fixed route transit a lot, although we might try to be a little more simple. We'll see what we can do. Well, we're going to talk today about the basics of these services, who's using them, and mostly dig into the research: What are some of the trade-offs we think about designing these systems and how to actually think about whether they're working. So first off, Mike, to start us, can you define microtransit for us?

Michael Hyland 00:05:50
I can try. I like to, for broad audiences describe it as very similar to Uber and Lyft. If you're familiar with their former shared or pooled ride services- Uber Pool, Lyft Line, Lyft Shared- it's most similar to those pooled ride services where you might be in a vehicle with a stranger. The key difference for microtransit versus Uber and Lyft is that the transit agency of the city owns the vehicles, the vehicle fleet and the service, even if it is operated by a private operator who's contracting out the service. Some of the other key differences between UberPool, LyftLine and microtransit services is: microtransit has a fixed fleet of vehicles and drivers at any given time. They're not contracting out or having drivers provide service in a short period of time. And also the fares tend to be much lower than Uber and Lyft and they tend to be flat fares like $1, $2 per trip.

Madeline Brozen 00:06:39
And if you see a microtransit vehicle on the road, what is the vehicle type?

Michael Hyland 00:06:44
It varies from like a conventional van, like a nine eight-seater van, to a I guess what you'd call a minibus, which might be able to fit 12, 16 people inside of it. I'm sure there are services out there that even use minivans to provide micro transit services, But think about it as a relatively small bus to a conventional van.

Madeline Brozen 00:07:04
So if someone wants to use microtransit, what's the technology? How are they calling summoning this? Is it through an app? And then, how are passengers matched with each other?

Michael Hyland 00:07:15
Happy to talk about that. So I think I should have mentioned earlier. It's kind of like the third generation of demand responsive transit. Like going back to the 70 s and 80 s. There was dial-a-ride services where you would call someone on the phone and they would dispatch the vehicle to where you said you were located. Typically you had to make that phone call the night before, 12 hours before, in some cases maybe an hour or two before, but there had to be some advance request of the service and it would come pick you up when you requested it or around the time you requested it. Paratransit came in the 80 s, 90 s, 2000 s, which is similar in many ways to the original dialer ride services but was required in federal law to provide transportation services to disabled persons. It's similar in service to fixed route transit that they're unable to access. And then to your question: how do people currently use demand responsive or microtransit services? So primarily it's through a mobile phone application application, but a lot of services still include the calling a dispatcher on the phone And some systems have a web-based app as well, So you can go on your desktop and request a ride. So those are the three main ways, but it's primarily for most people on the smartphone, And then I think I, given my long answer, forgot the second part of your question.

Madeline Brozen 00:08:29
So, how are people matched with each other, Like how you know? So, like if I request a ride and Mike requests a ride, like what's happened in the background to figure out who's getting picked up and where we're getting dropped off?

Michael Hyland 00:08:41
Folks have made the point that this is where the microtransit differentiates itself from prior versions. Besides having a smartphone where you can request, the light is that the dynamic routing applications and engines and algorithms are better than they have been before. So when someone makes a request on the phone at any point in time, there are certain vehicles that are either idle and not serving anyone or do have other passengers in the vehicle or the vehicles en route to pick them up. When I make a request, the vehicle needs to decide, or the system needs to decide, which vehicle to assign me to. It could be an idle vehicle or it could be an occupied vehicle that's coming near where I need to be picked up at and going towards where I need to be dropped off at. So initially it's the matching problem, matching the request to the vehicle, and then you need to route and schedule the vehicle to pick up and drop off myself and other passengers that might want to be served during a similar time period.

Madeline Brozen 00:09:32
So we talked about that this kind of is a Uber for transit type of thing. But what? What's? What's the purpose? What's? What goal is this trying to achieve?

Michael Hyland 00:09:43
Well, you asked a great question that I think you know. You said that you're a bit of a skeptic of microtransit- And I would not consider myself a giant proponent of microtransit- And particularly in practice, I think there is a lack of intentionality in regards to why transit agencies and cities are investing in and operating and implementing microtransit services. But from what I've read and to the extent that there's been research on this, the main goals and purposes for implementing microtransit center around expanding transit transit coverage. I do think that is the best use of it. It is an increasing coverage and equity-based component of public transportation. It can reach areas and locations that fixed route transit does not necessarily reach very well. I think a lot of agencies and the public view microtransit as a potential environmental sustainability solution. I disagree with that. I don't think it's a very effective environmental sustainability solution in the transportation space And some of the other ones listed providing better customer service to potential transit users. So we talked about how fixed-ride transit doesn't serve certain areas well. Well, with microtransit you can reduce walk times, maybe reduce wait times and provide this door-to-door, close-to-door-to-door service.

Madeline Brozen 00:10:56
I think that one of the things that microtransit is trying to do- correct me if I'm wrong- is provide this access without the cost of a 40-foot bus. Is that an explicit goal is to do access at a lower service cost?

Michael Hyland 00:11:14
I think if you go back to 2017, 2018, that was some of the press around microtransit. And why some elected officials wanted to go with microtransit is they didn't like seeing these large buses empty operating on their streets. They saw that as inefficient use of vehicle space and energy in the vehicles. And it is true. Because the microtransit vehicles are smaller, They do use less energy per mile and maybe per passenger- the microtransit vehicles in these low density city areas. But the main cost of public transportation, whether it's microtransit or fixed route transit, is paying the driver to operate the vehicle. So you're not saving a ton of money by moving from a large bus to a small bus. You can save some money. Maybe, let's say 10% per mile, 15% per mile be the operational cost savings there.

Madeline Brozen 00:12:02
I mean, I think even with a small cost savings there may be an argument to make, And I think we'll get into this at the end of our conversation about performance metrics is like if you can provide a better experience to people at a lower cost, like maybe this is kind of a sweet spot right. Like if the same bus is only going to come once an hour, it's really not helpful to people. If you can make a little bit better experience for that same person at a slightly cheaper cost, there's potentially a role for that service to play.

Michael Hyland 00:12:34
That's right, But the caveat being that you can't serve that many passengers with microtransit per hour, And that's really why you should think about your cost is per hour. So if you're trying to save money, I don't think microtransit is the right solution. If you're trying to provide better customer service, increased range of service, then microtransit can play a role there. You mentioned this bus is coming every 60 minutes, right, Which is bad. Even if you live on the bus route next to the bus stop, okay. But now you live, I don't know, a half mile, three quarter miles away. You need to walk, You need to make sure you're there before the bus gets there to ensure you don't miss it and have to wait another 60 minutes. So that's all the bad, negative aspects of fixed route public transportation that microtransit actually can help address.

Mike Manville 00:13:21
I mean, I think that the catch is that it's as you said, it's going to be expensive, And I think we can go back to our joint days in Ithaca, right, I mean, there are some customers that are always going to fall through the cracks of conventional public transportation And you probably remember, once you got outside the city of Ithaca, the TCAT buses. They rode these big loops through the rural areas around the city And if you needed the bus And there were people there who didn't have cars, There weren't even stops- You just had to be on that big road when it was coming and you flagged it down. That's how the driver knew to stop. If nobody was there waving, the driver just drove this huge loop and it was empty. And so one of the- probably at that time which sort of predated Uber and Lyft and things like that- the most common form of public transportation in those parts of the region was taxi cabs that would take people to the hospital and be covered by Medicare, which was, of course, insanely expensive. It was like a Medicare reimbursement rate, But like that was. The real issue is that you do have these people. They are transit dependent by most metrics and yet they don't live anywhere near, they don't live in circumstances where you could deliver them transit efficiently. And I think that as long as a transit agency sort of takes its redistributive mission seriously, or if it has elected officials telling it has to, you know they always have to figure out how do we deal with this group of people. I think there's another aspect to microtransit which is kind of like solving the first mile, last mile problem, which is a little bit different, But I think those two things are they end up being, to the extent there is a coherent justification for it's in one of those two buckets.

Michael Hyland 00:15:13
That's right, Yeah, So I think we might talk about a little bit later this urban, suburban versus rural use cases, And I think you laid out the quasi-rural in the case of Ithaca. Certainly, once you get outside the city it is quite rural.

Mike Manville 00:15:25
I mean, yeah, once you were outside the city it was functionally rural. You know, I mean that's and that I think that's why that bus service had so much trouble. You know Yeah.

Michael Hyland 00:15:35
Absolutely, And we mentioned the small bus versus the big bus. The smaller buses are easier to maneuver. That is a benefit of them. That maybe gets not a huge benefit, but often overlooked as well is it is easier to make these right turns and left turns in traffic And like a fixed route bus, you don't want your microtransit bus to be turning too much either, But to the extent you need to, it can more effectively than a fixed route bus.

Madeline Brozen 00:15:58
Maybe I'm just thinking about, like Ithaca or like I'm from Minnesota, snowy icy places like you know. Maybe you want to have some instances where a driver is not maneuvering a 40 foot bus in snowy icy conditions as well.

Michael Hyland 00:16:11
It's true. Just make a side comment here about Ithaca, Minnesota and Pittsburgh, where I'm from, which is like there's actually hills, right, And I went to move to Chicago and they were a real uppity about not having snow days when it got cold out And I was like, well, you don't have hills, So with the roads freeze and the school bus with like 40 kids on it is going down the hill at 20 miles an hour, There's a reason why we cancel school on those days and you don't need to worry about that.

Mike Manville 00:16:37
Yes, ice is a game changer, especially on a hill.

Madeline Brozen 00:16:42
So part of my skepticism about microtransit was that I felt like it was aimed at a different rider profile than traditional transit. Less about these people like that Mike Manville mentioned that fall through the cracks, but like trying to attract new riders to transit And that always just doesn't sit super well to me, because those people are much more expensive And there's a lot of people that have needs that I think are unmet and have also like there's a better case for serving them with a public service. But, to the extent that we know, are the people that are using microtransit different than typical transit customers? I know that like we're not going to find them in the National Household Travel Survey or something that's easy, But what do we know about who uses microtransit and if they're different than your traditional transit customer?

Michael Hyland 00:17:31
That's a great question. I think one of the other thing I want to mention is in terms of the purpose or goals. So initially there was this sales pitch that microtransit could reverse the decline in transit ridership, And I think that's a bad goal. It's ineffective, It doesn't work because of the reasons I said earlier, which is microtransit can't serve that many people per hour. So ridership was a goal- And I think that's where the story that you're referring to, Maddy, comes from- was that there were young people who maybe hadn't bought their first car yet or we're still living in an urban area. We want to keep these people in the public transit system, provide them this other mode that you know provides mobility and flexibility that a fixed route transit service does not, And so I think there was some initial sales pitches around young, tech savvy people to have them be using micro transit instead of Uber or Lyft or buying a car. And what the literature kind of shows- and there was an interesting story that I was, I think, uncovered and maybe other people have uncovered as well before this podcast- is that if you go back to the early studies around microtransit, the initial services did have young, tech-savvy, white male, high-income people riding them. But in those cases, actually the ridership for Kansas City- and I think it was the VTA in Santa Clara- had extremely low ridership. So it was just people who were tech-savvy and could figure out these apps that were just forming were the ones using it. Fast forward to today and basically all the micro transit services are oversubscribed. People are getting rejected because the systems can't serve them. There's too much demand And the demand- the people who are using it- are very similar to public transit riders. It's older people, it's low income people, it's people with physical disabilities. So there's a lot of overlap between micro transit and fixed route transit ridership. Right now. That's a function of the service quality. It's cheap, As I mentioned earlier- microtransit: $1, $2, $3 per ride- but you have to wait a long time on average. Some systems you're, on average, waiting 19, 20 minutes. Some other systems you're waiting 12, 13, 14 minutes, but the service quality is usually not particularly high. If you are that young, wealthy person, you're probably just going to pay for the Uber and Lyft and use that service instead.

Mike Manville 00:19:48
It's a tricky question. I mean in part just because sometimes we don't see the demographics the way we'd like to with some of these systems. But it's also just a tricky question conceptually because on the one hand- to Maddy's point, it's like, well, we don't want to have what's undeniably a more expensive system just to get atypical transit riders to now be technically using some form of public transportation. On the other hand, if you have people who look a lot like transit riders, invariably you're going to start to worry that, well, this is cannibalizing our transit system, which is much more efficient. And I don't get the sense that agencies that go into this really know what they're trying to do. And we have a couple of our alums, Miriam Pinski and Ann Brown. They have a few papers about this. They just show that there's a bunch of microtransit systems out there. Some of them say they're trying to boost most ridership. Some of them don't really say what they're trying to do. To your point, Mike, the evidence suggests that you might save travel time because it is a door-to-door service, but might not because you might sit at your door waiting for 30 minutes. And I think, to put the best possible spin on it, that there's this idea that there are people who look demographically a lot like transit riderships. They want to ride transit. A certain set of conditions prevents them from doing it, whether it's they work at night, when conventional transit is very infrequent, or they're just far enough away from the rail system they would use. And that door-to-door service could basically unlock a series of three more trips that are done by conventional public transit and you'd get sort of a multiplier effect. I think you know you could quarrel with whether even that is going to work out in a cost benefit way, But like that would probably be the best version of this. But I think also, you know, with me saying that anyone has to say like, well, who exactly are these people? I'm sure they exist, How many of them are there? And, to your point, you know, is there no other way that they could complete this right, this trip? And I think that's you know. These are real open questions that I don't think we have good answers to, even though we're now, you know, probably a good 10 years into agencies running these programs.

Michael Hyland 00:22:08
That's right. I think agencies are a little bit more clear-eyed about microtransit now than they were 10 years ago. But tying the implementation of the microtransit to explicit goals, I think we're still not there yet. That's where I'd like to see agencies get. I didn't do it in the context of microtransit, but I did a similar study to Anne and Miriam with micromobility and it was the same outcomes. The first question we asked was like: what was the purpose, what was the goal? And it was usually like: oh, I don't know. Like other universities, other cities are implementing e-scooters and e-bikes, so we thought we should do it too.

Mike Manville 00:22:43
People are talking about it a lot And I think one last point about sort of an agency picking this up, and I think both of you have alluded to this a little bit. But this concept that transit agencies have wrestled with for a long time. It does go all the way back to dial-a-ride, which dial-a-ride, of course, was just terribly inefficient And one of the huge expenses was just you paid a telephone operator to just sit there, right, And most of the time no one called, And then if they did get a surge of calls they were overwhelmed, right. So if you really wanted it to work at peak hours, you might have to have like five people on the phone, and the rest of the time they're just doing nothing. And the peer-to-peer platform solves that problem. It eliminates that expense. And then, if you look at the Uber or Lyft business model, you also shed all this capital, right, Like you don't own any vehicles, And the agencies, when they do the microtransit, they still have the peer to peer to help them, But then they onboard all that capital back And it's like: well, one of the huge advantages of Uber- and Uber still loses money- is that they don't own any vehicles. And now you want to do the same thing with price controls and owning the vehicles, And so it's just a. It's just a tall order.

Michael Hyland 00:23:59
It is Two key points. Off of that is: it's not in the vehicles, it's the drivers and the labor laws there.

Mike Manville 00:24:04
Yes, and the labor too, of course. Yeah.

Michael Hyland 00:24:04
As well, right Yeah, And you don't have as much flexibility as Uber and Lyft does, Even if Uber and Lyft own the vehicles and still have the flexibility of drivers opting in and out anytime they wanted when demand went down. That'd be more efficient than having to pay the driver for the whole six or eight hour shift they're doing.

Mike Manville 00:24:20
Yes, exactly, That's a great point.

Michael Hyland 00:24:22
And the other one is like: so maybe the audience doesn't know this, I'm not sure you guys know it either- but like most microtransit services are two vehicles to 12 vehicles. It's not a lot. So to the extent you do have that overhead, you do have the person at the transit agencies who's responsible for the microtransit. You have some of the technology that you've contracted out. Those are overhead costs that are not getting spread across Uber and Lyft- hundreds of thousands of drivers every day across the country. It's getting spread across just a few vehicles. So there is an upfront cost. I do modeling work and it's a little bit difficult to track down how much that cost is.

Madeline Brozen 00:24:59
I think, now that we've gotten some of the very basics out of the way, I think we've kind of teed things up well, just to talk about, you know, fleet size and how much it should cost, And you know you've both kind of mentioned this- but the main operational problem here is that microtransit programs are inelastic. You can't really scale them up without them being much, much more expensive. And you mentioned how you know, when agencies were doing this 10 years years ago, there was great enthusiasm And most of those folded or changed dramatically because they were like super over. Either they were super undersubscribed or they're way oversubscribed. They were just not really hitting a sweet spot. And I think one thing that we forgot to mention kind of in the setup is that microtransit typically works in zones. So there's like here is a particular area where most of the time your trip needs to be, you need to be picked, picked up and dropped off within that zone, And so one example was Sacramento. They launched their service in 2018.. They had a one-time grant to do this. They went really big. They had nine zones throughout their county And the program was trying to serve a big area, which was end up being really costly and having really long wait times. Since then they have dramatically restructure the program And I think we'll come back to like: how do you actually think about that? But that just talks about how it's easy to not design this well And even though you might not exactly know what the main goal is like. Something that is too expensive and isn't giving a good customer experience is definitely missing the mark. So one of the problems that your work talks about is the pricing structure. Most transit agencies are offering low cost flat fares, no matter if these are long trips in areas that are not served by transit or short trips, like when you are trying to get people to connect to a rail station. So you end up with demand that exceeds capacity, And so you kind of talked about a conceptual framework for microtransit planning, which looks at costs and revenue and demand. So I was wondering if you can talk a little bit bit about that And if you think about microtransit and how to design it. Well, are you designing it differently than you would for fixed route transit, Or are you using a lot of the same principles?

Michael Hyland 00:27:20
Great set of questions. So the conceptual framework you're referring to is that. The way I view it, transit agencies have kind of two main levers. One is service quality and one is the fare that they price their services at. So service quality: what are the big, more concrete decisions that they're making? One is the service area size and structure. So exactly what we're talking about, Maddie, like: the bigger the service region, the more potential demand there is. You're connecting people to more opportunities. We can get into the structure in a little bit, But one example that's quite important is like: do you have a hub right where your services are going to return to vehicles? That is every 30 minutes, every 60 minutes? There's a couple of studies now, including one by Sahin and some folks in Australia, that suggest that these hub-based microtransit services are more effective, more productive than the zone-based ones. Going back to fares and service quality, So transit agencies can control those. Of course, if they make the service quality better and decrease the fares, demand is going to increase. But if you make the service quality better and you have low fares, that's going to cost you a lot of money. You're going to have to have a large subsidy per traveler. So transit agencies, whether they realize it or not, are always playing around with these two main levers. Try to make sure they don't have too much demand, Otherwise only 20% of people are actually going to be able to get a ride every hour that want one. But you also don't want the service region to be so small and so inefficient in terms of its structure that no one wants to ride the service. So these are the main things, And then the performance metrics we'll talk about a little bit now, but I'll hit at first is: what is the cost of the transit agency? Revenues coming in, costs going out, what's the difference between those? And then also the service quality. Best way to think about service quality is, I think, wait time and what is the likelihood that you're just going to get rejected from the service because there's no way they can serve you in the next hour. So that's the idea behind the conceptual framework. Definitely happy to take more follow-up questions based on that framework.

Madeline Brozen 00:29:17
I mean, is that different than traditional transit planning?

Michael Hyland 00:29:21
So you mentioned this inability of microtransit to scale right. That's the key element here. You think about, like you put down your first bus route in a urban or suburban area, Whether you have one person that wants to ride that vehicle per hour or you have 50 people that want to ride that service per hour, the cost to operate that- let's call it- 30-minute headway service is going to be the same. Okay, Because they can fit on the bus, no problem at all. Whereas with microtransit you go from one passenger per hour to nine passengers per hour. You need a bigger fleet size, You need an extra vehicle to serve the nine passengers compared to the one passenger, And it's basically linear with small steps, right. So if you think about- I'll give you the kind of key number- Microtransit services are doing great if they're serving five passengers per vehicle per hour. So you go from five to 10 passengers per hour, you double your cost. You double again when you go from 10 passengers per hour to 20 passengers per hour, right, So these costs just are scaling linearly with the demand for the service, which is not the case for fixed route transit. Now, if you're in super dense urban, urban areas- Shanghai, Tokyo, et cetera- the volumes are so high that you do need a lot of buses to serve the demand, but that's not the case for most services in the US.

Madeline Brozen 00:30:39
I mean, I do think the other thing that is useful to think about contrasting these two types of public transit is that when you have these zones for microtransit, it does allow you to flex and change that right. So, for example, there's a program in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. It's a really hilly community, It's a low-end community, It doesn't have great transit service. They lost their main grocery store in the neighborhood and the city was able to actually change the microtransit service area so you could get to that grocery store right. Like that is just not something you're going to be able to do in a very quick way with fixed transit service.

Michael Hyland 00:31:20
That's exactly right, And that was called out 10 years ago with microtransit- initially, Actually, when there were private companies trying to operate outside of public transit spaces that you could easily flex to where the demand was, to where the land use changes, As you said. A great example was a grocery store going away. Maybe let's extend the service region or at least allow people to get to the bar line that would allow them to access a grocery store nearby. One downside, though, of these zones that you're talking about- and I don't have the empirical data- Actually I do have the empirical data from Sacramento, but we didn't look into it so I can't say this definitively- But the way they had all these small zones, there was just not a lot of resiliency within the zones, right? So if you had one microtransit vehicle per zone, if you just had a slight increase in the fluctuation of demand, that particular zone became underserved for that period of time because they couldn't move vehicles from other zones into to the zone that had the slight fluctuation in demand. So I was never a big fan of the large number of small micro-transit zones. I saw the reason they did. It was that they didn't want to be competing with their own fixed route transit service And they didn't want to be providing these very long distance trips, which do cost a lot And it's only charging people $2 for that long trip.

Mike Manville 00:32:40
I mean, I think one of the conceptual similarities between this and regular transit is that the planning is just intrinsically very difficult because in the vast majority of cases, you know you're going to lose money and you know that your goal is not necessarily to make money or to even minimize the amount you lose, And so it's very hard to know what you optimize around. So, like, Uber spent a lot of time losing money, but it always knew that its goal was to eventually make money. And so I can say: well, how are we going to structure our service? Well, I mean, we're going to organize around. Ultimately we want to be profitable. But I don't think that's the goal, nor necessarily should it be, of the typical microtransit. But then you have this difficult problem where it's like: well, what is the appropriate subsidy per ride, ride, knowing that the purposes of those rides and the people taking them is going to be very heterogeneous? You know, do we burn twenty dollars a ride? And we're comfortable with that if we really are getting the elderly woman to the train station safely in the middle of the night? And are we equally comfortable with that if it's the tech bro in the middle of the day who probably could have just called himself a waymo, but feels like saving some money. You know, I think in many people's gut like the first one sounds okay, depending on how much money it is, And the second one sounds less okay. But there's no easy way to answer that question. But it is the question that is at the heart of a lot of these services. Like we're going to use a lot of money to subsidize a lot of travel, What's the right amount?

Michael Hyland 00:34:14
I think you hit the nail on the head. Yeah, it's public money, right, We can talk about how there's different pots of public money, which does make it a little bit confusing for transit agencies to think clearly about, But it is taxpayer dollars, and is this a good way to spend those taxpayer dollars? My research and other research suggests that microtransit really does increase access to the locations that people need to go to and want to go to, And I think it is helpful for the audience to think about that example you gave earlier earlier, Mike, which was people who can't get to a healthcare facility or appointment otherwise. That's actually a lot of Uber and Lyft use cases among low-income people, And it's the same for microtransit. So there's an inherent value there for sure.

Mike Manville 00:34:55
I mean, there's value there, And I think what the next level of complication is that if someone is using it enough, you rapidly run into: well, geez, like it might get cheaper to buy them a car. But then of course, you know you talk very correctly, I think, about these different buckets that exist, which is that in the real world a transit agency does not want to buy people automobiles, right, Which I totally understand. So long as these. You know, there's something that's a little bit strange, in at least some circumstances, of running programs through transit agencies for private vehicle travel and doing it because the transit agencies can't provide that level of service in those circumstances. You know, if you abstract away from that, it's just like: well, this is why people have cars. And maybe this should be run through a different program that looks at some people- And of course this is not simple either- And just says like look man, we can buy you a car. It's actually like- rather than this $50 a pop Medicare trip, right, Like we could just buy you a car.

Madeline Brozen 00:35:57
No, I mean, I've heard people that work- actually I think it was someone I was having a conversation with- that works like for an insurance agency And they said they were looking at someone's these non-emergency medical trips for one person. They were like they were on dialysis or something right, Like someone that needed they're going to care twice a week for the rest of their lives, like some insanely. And they're like I could have bought this person a car right, Like there is a certain amount of point to that. I don't think that is the typical person that we're talking about in the microtransit, But it still is worth thinking about, like what is the value? How much public investment do we want to put into this? And I think, Mike, kind of coming back to your work on the fare part of it, you looked at a bunch of different ways like how to change the revenue side of that equation, which is more than a standard fare. But yeah, what did you kind of find about how to maybe think about the revenue and fare side differently to try to get this balance head in the better direction?

Michael Hyland 00:36:54
Absolutely yeah. So we looked at a whole range of different fare options. So we have the flat fare and then we have what's called like the fare to get inside a vehicle and then we have a distance-based fare. That's kind of similar to how Uber and Lyft and taxis structure their services as well, with a little bit of a time cost component as well. But we also looked at- it's not quite surge pricing, but it's like a peak period multiplier, similar to how some HOT lanes operate rate Basically during the periods where you know the demand is going to be higher than the other periods, it costs twice as much or 1.5 times as much or three times as much. The other thing we looked at was discounts for people who were going from microtransit to fixed route transit. How much should their fixed route transit be discounted if they took microtransit to get to the station? And we found that, unsurprisingly in dense areas. I'm going to use the word optimal and we'll explain what that means later. But optimal solutions all include a very large multiplier for the peak period compared to the off-peak. Downtown San Diego was like 4 X was the number we were getting at, which was huge. Suburban areas in San Diego are closer to like 1.3, 1.4, 1.5. And Matty, you mentioned the revenue sides. Obviously, if you charge higher rates you get more money, But the real benefit in my mind is not actually the revenue new, It is the management of the demand. So during those peak periods right now- I think I mentioned this earlier but it needs to sink in for folks listening- that a lot of people are getting rejected- The microtransit provider is saying: no, we cannot serve you in the next 45 minutes, Try again tomorrow or try again in an hour. And that's very unreliable. If you were trying to rely on microtransit and they're saying we can't serve you at all, that's a pretty bad service. So if you're using this price signal to the potential users of the system, someone who doesn't need to make the 9 a.m trip can shift that trip to another time of day and pay the off-peak fare, whereas someone who does need to get to that job interview does need to get to the healthcare appointment at 9.30- a.m. They're probably willing to pay this slight increase in the fare And I have this multiplier right. So it's like four for downtown San Diego. But if you think about it, the off-peak could be $ 0.50 and the peak period could be $2.. Right, that's kind of the numbers we're at here. So it's even a small signal among low-end people can be quite useful for managing demand.

Madeline Brozen 00:39:22
Have you ever talked to agencies about whether they'd be willing to do that? I feel like agencies are allergic to demand-based pricing.

Michael Hyland 00:39:30
I'm trying to get my story straight first to kind of put some feelers out around this idea of demand responsive pricing. I talked to some folks at VIA and they said that they're ready to do it if transit agencies want that. They see it as well as a good way to manage the demand. And we did, in my research for this podcast today, find there was a differential in one of the original services- $2 versus $3 between peak and off-peak. So there's some precedent for it. But what I'm talking about, I think, is a little bit more significant in terms of differential in pricing.

Madeline Brozen 00:40:08
And it seems like there's a space right, Like if we keep the fixed route transit fare at $2 and your other option is an Uber that costs $20, there does seem to be some space in the middle to actually play around with And like, on the times where you can't get them, like we could kind of flex things to be like actually, you know, taking the bus is going to be better for you know, if you really want to pay this lowest cost as possible. And in work, talking to low-income people that I've done with the mobility wallet, like people you know they are willing to actually pay things- everyone has a value of their time for certain types of trips and I think that we can be a little bit more reasonable in terms of using price signals and not just having flat costs for everything on the public side.

Michael Hyland 00:40:59
You mentioned this spectrum right. So when I gave my job talk at UCI and in my dissertation I gave the same, I have this diagram. I can remember it in my head. It's like on one end, we had taxis and on the other hand, we had fixed route public transit, right And in the middle there's this giant opportunity for services that fit somewhere in there. And I think what was overlooked is exactly what you said, Maddie, which is that like, okay, yeah, like we can't give away close to taxi service at fixed route transit fares. You need to pay a little bit more under some circumstances to get a higher quality service than fixed-route transit. I'm not here to disparage fixed-route transit. Of course, in many cases it does provide very good quality of service, but in one of these suburban areas we're talking about, it typically doesn't in California.

Mike Manville 00:41:44
And I think that there's a couple of things going on with this dilemma, but one of them is just that it's very easy to be sensitive to someone saying, oh, so-and-so got the ride for $2 and I had to pay three, and that's not fair. That's like a customer being treated differently than another customer and to sort of neglect the person who just gets turned down and realize that actually that's not fair either, by an equally compelling perspective. And then to Maddie's point, to realize that we have no way right now of separating how important the trip is among those people. And if someone just doesn't feel like there's that much urgency to their trip and they don't want to pay the extra buck and another person's- like I really have to get across town- it's probably better to move that second person. And in some ways you could argue, maybe it's not fairer but it is more efficient to say like, okay, well, the trip is worth $3 to this person and only $2 to the other, And so they get the ride first. And we do understand in most areas of life that's okay and it's not because the absolute numbers, what we're talking about- aren't huge. It's hard to argue that this is a real sort of a front to equity and I understand why. I think a lot of public agencies are really much more comfortable with sort of a first come, first served, almost functionally a lottery, than with them taking some affirmative step to say, well, this person gets priority because they're willing to pay a little bit more. We'll be right back.

Michael Hyland 00:43:20
You always put it so succinctly and effectively. Mike Perfectly said.

Mike Manville 00:43:25
Oh, thanks.

Madeline Brozen 00:43:27
So you mentioned kind of the idea of optimal trade-offs And so in this work you introduced the concept of the Pareto frontier, which is a new term to me, So correct me if I'm wrong, but it's essentially looking at optimal set of trade-offs in a multi-objective problem where you know no one single metric can be improved without sacrificing another thing. It's like this: forced trade-offs. I like this a lot because it offers a different way to think about trade-offs, which is just, in general the public sector is not good at doing Like we. Just it is a complex conversation to have, but these are real things that I think force important decisions. So you were trying to find a balance between mobility gains and the lowest total subsidy within a set of realistic program parameters. So what did you kind of come up with about, like the best way to balance the access gains and the subsidy costs?

Michael Hyland 00:44:24
You got that right, by the way.

Madeline Brozen 00:44:27
Good, I mean I probably just copied what you said in the paper, So it's the secret there.

Michael Hyland 00:44:31
Thank you And I should say you know, being an engineer, part of what I'm trying to do is push the Pareto frontier as far as possible, right to try to find, amongst these design parameters that we have, which ones are on this Pareto frontier and how good can we do in terms of saving costs and in terms of improving mobility for people in a community. So that's ultimately what it comes down to. There are other solutions that are not on the Pareto Frontier, that are worse in terms of both performance metrics than the ones on the Pareto Frontier, And we want to avoid those solutions. So we found that in suburban areas that, like the naive designs- $2 flat fare, whatever particular fleet size you're interested in, maybe 15 to 30 minute headways- Those solutions are pretty close to the Pareto Frontier. They're not on it. You can do better by incorporating some peak and off-peak differentials, discounts for transfers to fixed-route services and playing around a little bit with the headways on different lines. But in the slightly denser areas these naive solutions are very, very far away from the Pareto frontier. That is, we're wasting taxpayer money in one sense and not providing the taxpayer very good quality of service us And to be able to move to the Pareto Frontier. You do need these peak and off-peak differentials very much. One thing that was interesting about the suburban areas is that there are these big jumps on your front here from basically, let's say, $10,000 a day. The next solution requires $20,000 a day. So this big jump in the cost that it's going to need to operate And that ultimately comes down to: you've added one more vehicle to your fleet. You add one more vehicle to your fleet, your cost increased substantially And because you're in a low density area, it doesn't really matter what you do with the fares. You can't make up for that cost increase of the additional vehicle, Whereas if you're in a more dense area you have more room to play with on the fare side and you can actually make up the additional costs of the driver of the new vehicle with more fares and more riders And I guess real quick. The other one I want to mention: we did find that for a given area, if you want to provide more mobility, more access to destinations, you do of course need more microtransit vehicles And when you have more microtransit vehicles, actually your fares on average come down. That's going to be a big subsidy to provide that level of accessibility. But when you have a smaller fleet, the fares tend to be higher, And this ultimately comes back to the point I was making earlier: is you really do need to manage the demand when you have that smaller fleet of vehicles? Otherwise the wait times get very high and the likelihood of getting rejected also increases substantially.

Mike Manville 00:47:18
And this sort of exercise, again, is really difficult once you establish from the beginning that you're losing money. Right, Because the original concept of the Pareto frontier is sort of: it's based on the idea of the Pareto improvement, which is an exchange where at least one person's made better off and no one's made worse off, And these virtually don't exist outside of market transactions. Right, It's very hard for a- it's not impossible, but very hard for a government to engineer Pareto improvement. Most things governments do, including redistribution, like they might be incredibly valuable, but they make someone worse off. Right, You just took, you know, Elon Musk's money to help some low-income person. We might all support that, but it's not a Pareto improvement. So once you take a system and bring it to a Pareto frontier, while at the same time saying there's basically, at best, quasi-market exchanges, you've just given yourself a pretty hard task, And so I think it's you know, again, it just goes back to: this is a sort of deceptively hard task that agencies have undertaken for themselves because of all the constraints that they've put on it.

Michael Hyland 00:48:29
Absolutely, I should say, the way we frame this. Those constraints were built in So we don't even have this baseline of market efficiency. It's just like within the constraints you're operating under. Here's what that trade-off curve looks like.

Mike Manville 00:48:42
That makes sense.

Michael Hyland 00:48:42
I do agree with Maddy that even the communication that there is a trade-off curve we think is quite valuable, And then giving some sense of what the key design parameters are under the constraints can be helpful in some sense.

Mike Manville 00:48:55
I mean, the old line is sort of like whenever someone tells you they have three top priorities, you know you're in trouble, You know it's like you got to – because at a certain point you're going to have to rank them. And I think it's very common in non-market institutions like the ones we all work in for one. There's no need to just pick on transit agencies to say like nope, nope, all three are number one. And it's like: well, we're going to have an interesting time, aren't we?

Michael Hyland 00:49:21
Indeed.

Madeline Brozen 00:49:21
Well, and, Mike Hyland, you mentioned something earlier that the early versions of this was the private market trying to do this and it failed, Right. So, like from the get, there probably should have been a recognition that you can't make money like people tried and they, you know, they- left the market or they change how they were doing this And so, yeah, we're just into a. What are we willing to pay? I mean, I don't like the framing that. You know, transit should make money, like that, It is a public service, Right, But we do need to be clear eyed that there is a cost and what is it willing to pay, and that those costs vary within the system. Right, Like in Los Angeles, the 720 bus that runs on Wilshire Corridor, like that is cheap service because it's super, super efficient, But some other one- I'm going to pick on Lancaster, you know- out there like it's just not going to have the efficiency. We have different subsidy costs within the system and microtransit just needs to grapple with that as well.

Mike Manville 00:50:25
And I think maybe some of the most compelling cases I've seen for microtransit- although these cases often involved contracting out to an Uber or Lyft- was just like we've got a bus line that no one can justify, like a Lancaster bus line or somewhere else out in the desert, And maybe we just take that bundle of money and replace it with a contract with an Uber or a Lyft And again no one is saying that this is going to be profitable. But it's an awareness of what you're paying per trip or per mile- can help you decide well, what's worth it and what isn't. You know how many people are we actually let's? You know we're, we're prepared to subsidize up to this amount, but we also want to provide the best possible service that we can for that amount. And that, yeah, that's the, that's the conversation, that if you're not willing to confront the trade-offs you just don't have and then you end up with. You know, I think we've probably both seen sort of the LA Times pointing out that Metro Micro can cost $43 a ride and maybe these folks are just going across downtown LA and that's crazy.

Michael Hyland 00:51:30
Yes, I certainly did see that number many times in this research. Just to comment on a few points that went by in passing. Yeah, Maddie, like this is: Bridge and Chariot are the two private microtransit- I guess they call themselves like ride-pulling services- that entered the market- And you know I don't have access to their financials, but they went out of business very quickly. I think it became clear very soon that they weren't going to make money. And I heard one of the CEOs talking initially and he was saying: like Uber and Lyft do surge pricing- pricing and that's like we want our riders to have reliability, both in terms of travel time and in terms of the cost they're going to pay. And you know I was young at the time. I said that sounds great, that sounds really great. And then it was like: oh yeah, if you don't have surge pricing, you're not going to have reliable service and you're not going to make any money. So that's probably why they went out of business within like six months, although I should say we did uncover in my research that you can make money providing a service in downtown San Diego, which I guess makes sense, right, Like it's dense enough, And if you assume Uber and Lyft aren't operating there, you can serve that market and make some money.

Madeline Brozen 00:52:36
But that seems to be a really key thing is: you can only make money if you don't have this direct competition, with an ability to actually get somewhere one trip at a time, without your own car.

Michael Hyland 00:52:46
Indeed. Yeah indeed.

Mike Manville 00:52:47
And, of course, if you've been in downtown San Diego, you look around and you're like, well, I'm not even sure I need microservice, right. It's sort of a. It's a kind of a dense little area. There's buses, there's- you know, large swaths of it. You could probably make a nice trip on foot. And it just gets back again to this issue of- and this is a criticism that I think has been raised about- a lot of things that flew out of the tech revolution into transportation. It's like, well, people just felt like they had to have them And, in fairness, there was some money, there were some buckets of money available to experiment with them, And so sure, why not. But it's sort of the cart before the horse, where you jump into this program without figuring out exactly what it's supposed to be doing or thinking hard about how what you want it to be doing might there might be a tension within that.

Michael Hyland 00:53:38
And then we've touched around this idea of the money for microtransit becoming available, And I guess we can talk a little bit more about it now. So microtransit seems to be a series of pilots- right, Everyone's piloting microtransit. And we're, as you said, 10 years in, or at least eight years into microtransit services. And I had a conversation with a very senior executive transit agency in California. I won't name any names for their sake, But essentially what they told me was like two things: This service is great. Wait, do whatever you can to keep the money flowing from CARB towards our agency for this service. People in this area love it. And they also told me: don't let everyone know in our region about how good this service is, because they're going to start asking for it as well. I was like, okay, yes, You just succinctly put what the issue is. Right here.

Mike Manville 00:54:27
You know, and it's a great point about, we've had a decade of pilots, and that alone should tell us something, right? Like you know, have we not learned what we need to learn from all these pilot programs? And, of course, then the other issue you raised is that these are funded in California by the resources board to a great extent- not always- And their interest is in reducing vehicle miles traveled, but they're putting people in cars, And you know You can make that work in your head. There's scenarios where it would happen, but most of the time, if you're taking someone who doesn't have a car and putting them in a car, you're not going to reduce vehicle miles traveled, And so that's an extra tension layered on top of this, because CARB often wants to hear in results of these pilots that, in addition to providing access and so forth, this many greenhouse gas emissions were reduced, And it's like, yeah, that's not how that works. You know car drives GHGs.

Michael Hyland 00:55:25
Indeed, Yeah, And I mean yeah. I see it as a benefit that it is inducing travel, It is serving trips that weren't otherwise served. But if your carb and your main thing you care about is the emptying greenhouse gas emissions, then it's just not the case.

Mike Manville 00:55:35
I mean, you know, I think there's a perfectly good access-based argument to say that the marginal benefit of these VMT exceed their cost. But in the top floor of the Air Resources Board office, that's not what they want. Yeah, So it's just a complicated situation.

Michael Hyland 00:55:53
I haven't heard this argument being made, but maybe I'll make it right now to be our own devil's advocate, which is that it is easier to have an electric microtransit vehicle than it is a bus, as far as I understand it right now.

Mike Manville 00:56:04
Electric bus is so hard.

Michael Hyland 00:56:07
Exactly Right. So to the extent that's playing in a role, then maybe there's a GHG benefit there, if not a VMT benefit.

Madeline Brozen 00:56:15
I mean, if you take the same ride in electric microtransit, which it is a question, how many of these services are using electric vehicles? Do you have a sense? Is it common?

Michael Hyland 00:56:26
I don't want to say their own number, but my ballpark would be like the 30% range.

Madeline Brozen 00:56:32
So I mean it is something that I think does have more opportunity. I mean, for a lot of reasons the electric bus market in the United States is very weak and it's very hard to do. Also, like even if the technology was more ready, But if you're looking at a sprinter van, you know, or something that just has a smaller load, the power that needs to draw on, like there is probably more opportunity there.

Michael Hyland 00:56:58
Still have some operational constraints, though, on the EV micro-transit vehicles that you have with the buses as well, So it's not all rainbows and sunshine.

Madeline Brozen 00:57:06
Well, let's just talk a little bit more kind of on the cost benefit side, because one of my favorite lectures when I was a graduate student at UCLA was from Mike Manville, who was guest lecturing in Don Shoup's class. I'm sure Don was just on vacation and was like you, sir. You come talk to the students.

Mike Manville 00:57:25
In fairness to Don, he didn't usually go on vacation. He usually went off to preach about parking somewhere, which to him was a vacation.

Madeline Brozen 00:57:32
Yes, That's true. Yes, He was like I need to take my argument to the people You teach, the students, which is actually you know perfectly good, because it was a great lecture.

Mike Manville 00:57:41
That sometimes happened yeah.

Madeline Brozen 00:57:42
It's a good trade-off exactly, And the topic was about cost benefit analyses And I just remember it so clearly because Mike Manville was making the point that costs are very fixed and benefits are very squishy. I'm sure he used a better technical term, but that was kind of my memory of it And we've mentioned this already a lot- that microtransit gets a bad reputation for being high subsidy- just the sticker price of it. I mean I do think even if you look relative to fixed route transit, it is more costly per passenger, per revenue hour. But yeah, I mean, so if you're just saying here's the cost of microtransit and we talked about the benefits, which is access or the value of people's time, whatever it is, what's a good way to kind of have a conversation about the benefits of microtransit when it's going to be put in conversation with a pretty hard number about its costs?

Michael Hyland 00:58:38
Great question. I totally agree that measuring the benefits, making them concrete, is very challenging. Cost side's easier. I would not call it easy, particularly when you need to go behind some hidden doors at transit agencies to figure out where the money's coming from and where it's going to and what can actually be considered the microtransit versus other costs. But on the other hand, what's the alternative right- I think this is where academics can shine- is trying to make these benefits more concrete and thinking very rigorously about how we do measure the benefits of something like microtransit services. I guess I'll define destination accessibility for the audience, but the big idea is the ease at which people can get to the places they want to go and they need to go. And there are many ways to try to quantify accessibility. The simplest ways are like: what's the distance of the travel time to the nearest grocery store or the nearest healthcare facility? You can also do this counting of number of grocery stores and healthcare facility within 15 minutes, 30 minutes, et cetera. There's more advanced econometric techniques to try to get at a dollar value associated with this improvement in accessibility. And I've done that. I've used those techniques. That's exactly what we did for this Pareto Frontier: Not quite access to destinations, but just general mobility to get to the places that you're already going to, The idea being, like, anytime you improve microtransit, that gives some benefit to the people that live in the region. But, of course, if there's already this ginormous gap in quality between what a private vehicle gives you and what microtransit and fixed route transit gives you, a small improvement in the transit side of things actually doesn't provide much value to anyone at all. If they're closer to each other, or microtransit happens to be better and you improve microtransit or you improve public transit, that gives a big benefit to people in the community. So that's the idea, but it's tricky for these new services that are more- how do I say? You need a finer resolution of model to be able to capture and grasp what are the benefits that they're providing people. Maybe I can stop here for a second, but I do think it is worth thinking about these people that do need to get get to healthcare appointments. That's certainly not every microtransit rider, but that's some of them, And our models we've used are definitely not capturing the fact that microtransit saves them a few minutes compared to fixed route transit. There's a more inherent value in being able to get to that destination than other ones that are out there.

Mike Manville 01:01:15
I agree with that point that with these new services it's hard because you don't necessarily have the data you need to really say, well, here's the benefits, here's the cost. And that's because, in part, some of these pilots just don't come with adequate evaluation criteria attached to them. California, frankly, sometimes people get grants to do microtransit type stuff and then just don't do the evaluation, right, And at the end of it you know the agency is like OK, shrug, And it's like well, but now we don't know if this worked. And that's the point of a pilot, because what you really need is some sense of what it's actually doing and then some way to put a dollar amount on that. And so a classic example of cross-benefit in transportation is this federal law- that I think was maybe end of Obama or beginning of Biden- that said like, okay, on new cars they have to have backup cameras, right. And you could say- and this was admittedly a much simpler problem, but it's like, how much is that going to cost the carmaker, How much will that cost the consumer as a result? And then how many crashes are averted because you don't have someone either not looking over their shoulder or looking in the wrong spot And you can put it involves an assumption, some sort of dollar value on that. But it's just, you know, you had to draw on a lot of data for that at, And we have these small pilots with not that many users And sometimes we don't collect any information. And then at the end of it's like, well, what are the benefits? And all you can really say is like, you know, we don't really know And that creates a bias against the program. Right, Because we do know. I mean, to your point, Mike, with some work, you can know how much they cost. It's like, geez, that's a lot of money. And it's like, well, what did they do? And it's like, well, yeah, we didn't really bother to find out. It's like, well, gosh, you know, how do you expect people to react?

Michael Hyland 01:03:08
I give CARB a very positive shout out here. So I'm building some modeling tools for them in general, for their STEP program, Sustainable Transportation Equity program, And they're doing this. I don't know if they call it a research contract, but it's certainly a research contract for me. That involves three case studies And one of the case studies is this Bayview Hunters Point microtransit service And SFMTA is giving us all the ridership data we could want. It's awesome And it's VIA that's operating it. They're providing us their quarterly surveys that we help design for the existing riders And I think the thing that they like and we think is quite valuable is that we're surveying the community. So figuring out both for riders and non-riders, I mean, obviously doesn't provide any value to non-riders per se, but we want to get their opinions and thoughts about why they're not riding it. What connections is it not making? Is it that they don't have a bank account or a smartphone? What's the reason they're not using the service? So for this one pilot, where they have researchers involved, we are really trying to grasp what the benefits are. But it is still a little bit squishy, right, Because we have a series of questions to try to get at this latent concept of like: how does this new service allow you to get to the places you want to go and the places you need to go? And we're going to tie that to our more objective network-based metrics to see if they're consistent, at least directionally.

Mike Manville 01:04:30
But that's you know, and it's always going to be a little hard. You know these are fairly abstract concepts that we're trying to measure when we oftentimes, when we do the benefits. But that's such a huge improvement over what I think is still. Things have been getting better. But still too often, you know, we run a program and evaluating it is kind of an afterthought. It remains the exception that a city or an agency tries something and builds into it And we're going to figure out exactly what it did.

Michael Hyland 01:04:59
Totally agree. I mean, I know, Mike, you and I are on a Caltrans project for HOT lanes And, Matty, I know you're heavily involved with the mobility wallets And, as I understand it, there was not a lot of money set aside for the mobility wallet evaluation. You guys are trying to figure that out as you go and doing a great job, But in general, I think that's a key point. It is important if we're spending millions or tens of million dollars on something to figure out if it actually worked or not.

Madeline Brozen 01:05:25
Well, and kudos to the agencies that are figuring out how to do this. You know, even in our work with LA Metro, yes, we have to find the research dollars, but we are partners that were embedded with the agency, And so I think- just to anyone that's on the practice side that's interested, just having conversations with university researchers in advance of doing these things you can get immense value, because too often, even when there is evaluation, you're brun at the end and you just got to work with what data you have at that point. And so, being able to design it early on and just think about you could have these great conversations where you at least try to be like: what is your goal? Let's work backwards and like: see if we can actually measure that, And if we can't get there exactly, we're going to get as close as we can.

Mike Manville 01:06:09
I mean, I think that's such a good point that the evaluation has to. You have to be thinking about it while you're rolling it out, while you're planning it right And you know, so that you sit down with the potential evaluator and if that person says, okay, well, you know what's this look like if it works, And if you don't have an answer, then, like you should probably delay this a little bit, especially if you're calling it a pilot, Because the whole point of a pilot is to see if something works and if you have no benchmarks, then you just, like you know, on the last day of the program you just decide if you feel good and that's— That's not the best way to do things. I mean, hopefully you feel great, but like that's not very telling.

Michael Hyland 01:06:49
There are always some benefits, right. Like you spend $500 a microtransit rider, someone's going to have benefited from that, right.

Mike Manville 01:07:00
I mean, you'll always be able. I'm not saying people do this, but if you wanted to, you'll always be able to grab a couple of people, put them in front of a microphone at a press conference and have them say this program changed their life. I rode the micro transit every day, took 700 rides. It cost the public $3,000,000.

Madeline Brozen 01:07:17
Well, I mean also like there is success in figuring out what doesn't work. We tried this and we figured out it was too hard, We couldn't do it right. I mean that's a whole other conversation about. That's a very tricky conversation to have in public. But you know, I just want to say it here, kind of in the space of like we're academics, we just get to say stuff, But you know, saying like we try this, we learned a lot and we learned that we shouldn't do this, That's fine.

Mike Manville 01:07:43
That's a great point. That's something agencies and I understand why they're very reluctant to say that We did this and we kind of figured out that at least for now it's a dead end, because the pressure is always on to say no and it worked, because you fear that some opportunistic political opponent of yours is going to say, oh my God, they wasted this much money. And then the right answer to that is like no. I mean, this is why we call it a pilot. It's not a waste of money. We had to find out if this works or not. And sometimes we learn it doesn't work, And that's. It's good that we know that. It would be bad if we learned that and then threw a bunch of 20, you know the $20,000,000 into it. Yeah, then by all means criticize us, But I do. You know politicians are risk averse and I get it. But it's so true that there's a real reluctance to just say: you know, this one we tested. It doesn't seem promising, we're going to drop it.

Madeline Brozen 01:08:35
So to wrap up here, Mike, as I mentioned, your work is part of a larger effort looking at how microtransit can be complementary to fixed route transit. I don't know if we got there in this conversation. Today, but can you share a little bit of what's on the docket for that part of the work?

Michael Hyland 01:08:50
So I should say my background is like applied operations research, So I've done a lot of stuff on like routing, repositioning, assignment stuff And I put that together to analyze these more planning and policy questions in the micro transit space And we talked a little bit about the fare setting and the fleet sizing and the headways and the fixed route transit for joint design. But now we are trying to look at what is the right structure. So we talked about, like Sacramento had these nine different zones, What would be the disadvantage of combining those zones? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of having more large zones than the large number of small zones? And then back to the operations side. What University of California funded me and we've gone pretty far on. But one of my students for TUNE, who you mentioned is going much farther on, is understanding the negative impacts of the human unreliability in micro-transit services. So I guess to talk a little bit about that, you'll notice Uber Pool and LiftLine don't really exist in many locations anymore And I think the main reason for that is because humans are unreliable. Drivers really do not like the ride pool services because they don't like having to wait for a traveler to pick them up at the pickup location. But they really, really, really don't like it when they have another customer in the backseat who's getting annoyed that the new passenger is not getting in the vehicle. Cool, And this happens with microtransits- the person not showing up at the pickup location. Obviously there is unreliability related to congestion in general, Travelers cancel rides, travelers no show at pickup locations. So we're trying to understand that unreliability and quantify it and understand how negatively it impacts microtransit services.

Madeline Brozen 01:10:35
And you'd even get to like. You know, this guy got in and I did not want to have a conversation with this other person.

Michael Hyland 01:10:42
Indeed. That is also an important factor there.

Madeline Brozen 01:10:45
I do feel like, in some ways, microtrans it's a little bit better because there's maybe more space And so people have a little bit more of the behavior of. This is the bus and I keep my head down And you know, the norm is we don't talk to each other. But curious what your student finds out in that space.

Michael Hyland 01:11:00
Indeed, yeah indeed.

Madeline Brozen 01:11:05
Well, thank you so much for your time. I hope anyone that was, maybe, just like us, kind of skeptical about this service has learned something and walked away with thinking about that. There is a space for something that's kind of in between a 40-foot bus and an Uber, and we should explore more of these types of models.

Michael Hyland 01:11:24
Thank you very much, Maddie and Mike.

Mike Manville 01:11:26
Thanks for coming on.

Madeline Brozen 01:11:32
You can read more about Mike Hyland's work on our website lewis.ucla.edu, where the show notes and transcript can be found. Thanks again to Transfers Magazine for their support. You can find them at transfersmagazine.org. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Bluesky and LinkedIn, and thanks so much for listening.