GETTING FROM Point A to Point B in eastern Massachusetts can be a journey – linking subways, buses, and commuter rail across the MBTA system. But once a person gets west of Worcester, the best connection between two regional transit bus systems might be a small van network overseen by a scrappy community organization.
“What you’re going to see is that when the budget is tight, services in rural areas are the ones that are going to be cut, because ridership is the metric,” Jen Healy, the rural transit program manager at the Quaboag Valley Community Development Corporation, said on The Codcast. “However, people in rural areas still need to go places; they still need to access resources. And, with fewer options, sometimes the impact is even greater because they have no other option of how to get to the doctor, get to work, get to the grocery store.”
Enter micro-transit.
Micro-transit programs tend to be services that respond directly to needed transport, rather than circling a fixed route. People inside a micro-transit service area request a ride by calling or using an app to schedule a trip within a few hours or pickup a day or two in advance, depending on how robust the program is.
“They can look a lot of different ways, which is something that’s fun about them,” Healy said, “but mostly they’re smaller and more flexible transportation systems.”
The Franklin Regional Transit Authority has been offering in-house micro-transit for about five years, which was a more flexible option for the lower ridership peak pandemic years. With fixed-route bus ridership rebounding, the system used micro-transit to pilot the weekend service routes now incorporated into the fixed schedule.
The Quaboag Connector serves a 10-town area between Springfield and Worcester, reserved about 48 hours in advance and carrying out around 1,100 rides a month. “That’s only because I’m out of vehicles and staff is hard to find,” Healy said.
Healy and Rachel Lea Scott, a community engagement specialist at Transportation for Massachusetts, authored an op-ed for CommonWealth Beacon in late May, calling for more investment into micro-transit.
Healy said the introduction of ride-share services like Uber and Lyft “probably brought people around to the idea of demand-response transportation for the general public a bit more,” but they can be even scarcer to come by in far-flung areas of the state than robust public transit.
“At the end of the day, we just need people to be able to access resources,” Healy said, “and beyond accessing resources, I want people to be able to go see their friends and family. Whatever combination of structures and systems makes that happen is exciting. Out here in rural areas of the state – this is the story that I tell everybody that I speak to, really – is we had somebody try to call an Uber home from a hospital a few years ago, and it said that it was gonna take 24 hours to arrive and cost $400. So taxi services, even, but certainly ride-share services, are not that available to rural residents.”
Even more covered regions often use some forms of micro-transit, generally dedicated to older riders or riders with accessibility issues. The RIDE – an MBTA-run on-demand paratransit service in Greater Boston – started a pilot in 2016 that grew into an ongoing partnership with Uber and Lyft to augment service. Using the two ride-share services, at a reduced rider cost, is the only way to order a same-day trip on the RIDE.
With the expansion of cross-state service through the forthcoming east-west rail – or west-east if you ask the Healey administration’s new director tasked with overseeing the regional transit project – Healy says micro-transit will still be part of the equation. The inland route will have stops in Boston, Worcester, Palmer, Springfield, and Pittsfield, with the two year construction process expected to start roughly in spring of 2027.
Potential ridership for those stops is broader than just the few miles immediately around the station, Healy notes.
“I think everyone is really excited about the opportunity of having a rail option out here that could connect us on to the rest of the Commonwealth,” she said. “That said, folks need to get to those train stations. So, at the Quaboag Connector, our sort of piece of that has always been that we fully expect to be driving folks to the Palmer rail stop that is planned. Palmer’s one of our service area towns, and we know from experience that a lot of folks can’t get to Palmer without the connector.”
When the option is there, Healy said, folks will be able to plan their lives differently around it. While the whole state is struggling with a housing shortage, western Massachusetts has a bit more stock available, so there can be a disconnect between those who might live in the western part of the state and be effectively transit-isolated from the eastern side, let alone continuing on to the rest of New England.
“Sometimes folks get placed here and then they can’t commute to work,” she said. “But you have passenger rail, you have micro-transit initiatives that can maybe connect them to RTA services too, depending on what’s available in the area, and suddenly their world opens up.”
