Mike Mangan, Vice President, Commute with Enterprise
As communities evolve and commuting habits change, city leaders and transit agencies face numerous obstacles in rebuilding ridership and increasing operational efficiency. Safe, efficient, and reliable public transit is essential for quality of life everywhere, so leaders need to consider the best ways to navigate these changes and new challenges to ensure communities are equipped with the proper mobility solutions for today and the future.
Changing Community Landscapes
According to APTA (American Public Transit Association), 45 percent of people do not have access to public transportation. With rising costs of living and more organizations turning to hybrid work, transit agencies will continue to face challenges in providing rider access, reducing transit deserts, and rebuilding ridership.
When people are priced out of urban centers, they often move farther away and out of reach of traditional public transit. At the same time, others are taking advantage of hybrid work by moving farther away and driving longer distances only a few times per week.
Research shows the average round-trip commute to work now extends to 54 miles, a significant increase from 2019. These developments mean it can be harder for transit agencies to reach people with traditional fixed route modes than in years before.
Many transit agencies are already dealing with operational deficits and ridership levels still below where they were in 2019. Now, they are tasked with stretching services to reclaim riders and generate revenue. While traditional fixed route modes will always be vital for communities, these shifts demand new mobility strategies with flexible, safe, and cost-effective solutions.
A Mobility Solution for Today and the Future
A solution gaining momentum throughout the country is vanpooling. Commute with Enterprise, one of the largest vanpool operations in the U.S., now provides as many passenger miles per day as some of the largest transit agencies in the country, according to publicly available data. This is because vanpooling helps solve some of the most pressing issues transit agencies are facing today.
As transit agencies work to rebuild ridership, one of their biggest challenges is finding ways to reach the growing number of people living in areas without convenient access to traditional modes of public transit. Vanpooling is an excellent complement to fixed route services because programs are customizable and nimble. They can fill gaps in urban areas and connect people living in suburban and rural communities to workplaces across a region. Vanpooling works in urban, suburban, exurban and rural communities.
Achieving a multimodal system where flexible solutions and fixed route modes complement and enhance each other is essential to reduce transit deserts, increase rider access, and rebuild ridership.
Increasing operational efficiency is also a top priority for many transit agencies facing deficits, and vanpooling is a cost-effective solution. In some of the largest programs, Commute with Enterprise represents more than 30 percent of an agency’s total passenger miles, but less than 2 percent of the agency’s overall budget. Recent FTA data shows vanpooling to be, on average, 10 times more efficient than fixed route transit modes.
Alongside commuter buses and commuter rail services, vanpooling is a critical part of today’s multimodal transit system. Transit agencies needing to adapt to changing community landscapes, build ridership and become more efficient can set up vanpools quickly with Federal Transit Administration and Federal Highway Administration funding.
Mike Mangan is Vice President of Commute with Enterprise for Enterprise Mobility. He is responsible for oversight of the organization’s vanpool operations and other commuting solutions.
Commute with Enterprise is one of the largest and most cost-effective vanpool operations in the United State, eliminating an estimated 1.1 billon passenger miles each year*. This alternative commuting solution offers customizable programs to help overcome transportation challenges whether it is job access, transit reach congestion/pollution/VMT reduction or financial efficacies.
