Located in northern Virginia, Loudoun County Transit (LCT) was providing a paratransit service that picked up and dropped off passengers around the existing local fixed route. However, with a traditional scheduling and dispatching system that only accepted call-in and subscription bookings, scheduling trips had to be done manually which was inefficient and time consuming. When Keolis was engaged as the fleet operator, they partnered with RideCo to provide LCT with an automated on-demand solution.
LTC was seeking a solution to address the operational challenges in delivering its paratransit service. The goal of the agency’s partnership with RideCo was to innovate and automate LTC’s manual scheduling and dispatching processes, that were previously limited to call-in and subscription bookings, as well as improve overall service KPIs.
With RideCo as the technology partner, LCT and Keolis now offer an on-demand, door-to-door, paratransit service that runs more efficiently using automated scheduling and dispatching software. Call-in and subscription bookings are available to riders, in addition to the new app-based booking option. The service has seen a significant improvement across all KPIs, including passengers per vehicle hour and on-time performance. Shared rides and overall paratransit ridership have increased as well, with failed search requests being minimized using RideCo’s dynamic scheduling and routing algorithm, Solver.
