FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 13, 2022
MARTA EVALUATES ON-DEMAND
TRANSIT PILOT PROGRAM
MARTA Reach Served
Thousands of Riders Over Six Months in Clayton, DeKalb, & Fulton Counties
ATLANTA
– The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), in partnership with
the Georgia Institute of Technology, is evaluating MARTA Reach, a six-month
pilot rideshare program that connected riders to-and-from MARTA bus and rail.
The
pilot ran from March through August, providing over 7,500 trips and serving
8,335 customers in West Atlanta (Dixie Hills, Collier Heights, and Florida
Heights), Decatur, Avondale Estates, Belvedere Park, the Gillem Logistics
Center, Forest Park, Morrow, and parts of Alpharetta and Roswell. The app-based
service used MARTA Mobility vehicles and operators and was funded in-part by a
$1 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
“The end of service is not the end of the Reach
program. Evaluation is the second half of any successful service pilot,” said
MARTA Interim General Manager and CEO Collie Greenwood. “Now we can study what
worked, what didn’t, and how Reach may be adopted and expanded to help
complement our upcoming bus network redesign.”
Service data shows customers waited on average
just over seven minutes for a ride after requesting one and spent an average of
nine minutes traveling to their destination. Thirty-five percent of all Reach
trips were taken in August, with the highest ridership coming on the final day
of the pilot. Early pilot results show that close to 60 percent of all Reach
trips were taken in the West Atlanta zone, a primarily residential community
that includes H.E. Holmes rail station, and 35 percent of trips taken in the
Belvedere zone. The most frequent users of the service were Black women between
25 and 34 years old.
Georgia Tech’s Industrial and Systems
Engineering (ISyE) team, under the leadership of Professor Pascal Van
Hentenryck, provided the technology, including routing logic, and rider,
operator, and administrator system apps for the project. MARTA and
Georgia Tech are working together to evaluate the pilot data and will provide a
deeper analysis and next steps in January.
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