A Brief History of Kansas City’s Microtransit

In 2016, Kansas City, Missouri became a pioneer in ‘microtransit,’ on-demand transportation services used to supplement or — in some cases — replace public transit.

In a piece for Bloomberg CityLab, David Zipper describes the city’s experiment and interviews Kansas City Area Transportation Authority CEO Frank White III, who says the original goal of introducing microtransit was to get more people to ride transit.

White admits that the public subsidy for the city’s current on-demand transit service is between $20 and $25 per passenger — roughly ten times as much as a fixed-bus route. But White asserts that “It works best in less dense areas. You could use it in rural areas where there is no fixed route service at all, or you could use it as a feeder system to nearby buses — but then the whole system has to be correlated, which can be challenging.”

For White, microtransit can also be a tool for gauging public interest in transit to pave the way for future fixed-route service and serving areas with no other options. “I think we’ll see more strategic use of microtransit, focusing on less dense areas and connecting with our fixed-route buses.”