courtesy of Via
Bundled up at sunrise in early March, I stood at the edge of Shrewsbury, eyes on a glowing cell phone screen, trying to make the 12-mile journey to Mercy Hospital South. Neither MetroLink nor MetroBus goes there. Uber, the ride-hailing service, would’ve charged me $24 for this trip. Instead, I went with Via, a similar service that Metro is partnering with on a pilot basis. Via’s van rolled up right away and drove me straight there for $3—a bit more than a bus ticket. (It would’ve cost $0, had I known the first five rides were free.)
Via is a private, New York–based company that teams up with public transit agencies such as Metro to offer low-cost rides on demand. It’s like Uber and Lyft in that you hail your ride through a cell phone app and often join other passengers inside the vehicle, but it’s also like public transit in that you pay a subsidized fare and must walk a distance to a pickup spot, just as you would to a bus stop. St. Louisans are clearly warming to it: By February, monthly completed rides had jumped 287 percent over the previous year. The question is whether that’s a good thing.
Via is not available everywhere in town. Metro debuted the service in June 2020 as a solution for “transit deserts”—suburban areas in southwest and north St. Louis County with a dearth of bus stops and MetroLink stations. (Metro has since added a third zone in West County.) When the pandemic shriveled rider demand and drained its driver pool, Metro shut down certain bus lines but wondered if Via could cover the stranded riders. According to Metro CEO Taulby Roach, the “most important indicator” of success is use: “Are people taking advantage of this service, and are they using it repeatedly?”
At first, monthly ridership rose and fell while—according to the Via drivers I chatted with—certain kinks were being smoothed out. (Some issues persist, it seems: On two of my six rides in March, I had to wait an hour or so for pickup because my first assigned driver was delayed en route; average wait time, Via reports, is 10–15 minutes.) But then, monthly completed rides swelled from 1,500 in February 2021 to 5,800 in February 2022. And unique users more than doubled from November to February.
More is not necessarily better, warns Jarrett Walker, a consulting transit planner, on his blog HumanTransit.org. “Attracting many riders to flexible services is the last thing a transit agency should want to do,” he argues. The point of microtransit is “lifeline access to hard-to-serve areas, where availability, not [increasing] ridership, is the point.” If a service like Via becomes too attractive and popular, Walker says, the agency ends up spending more than it would have with fixed routes.
Asked whether this could happen here, Roach says Metro is “continuously evaluating” to ensure the numbers make sense and points out that “Via’s flexible platform makes it easy to adjust service zones and hours to changing demands.” He sees Via as a complement to, not a substitute for, MetroLink and MetroBus.
Yet for Antoine Tucker, a 33-year-old seated next to me in the van on that early March morning, Via is indeed a substitute—and a critical one. The 101 Fenton bus that used to stop at his workplace at Gravois Bluffs Plaza was canceled early in the pandemic. Without Via, he says, he’d have to find another job. “It’s a good service,” he says, adding, “I was actually thinking about driving for Via.”
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