After notable successes in Belœil and Terrebonne, exo wants to continue developing “on-demand transportation” in the suburbs far from the metropolis. The carrier will be implementing this personalized service in Mont-Saint-Hilaire and Otterburn Park starting in mid-August, with more direct and frequent routes.
With this new service, offered in Belœil and Terrebonne for several years now, customers can book their trip using a mobile application or exo customer service. The user then specifies their destination and departure time, and is then informed – again via the application – of the upcoming arrival of the bus. They pay for their fare once on board.
“We can clearly see the potential it has to better respond to the new, very local travel patterns of our users. People are going less towards Montreal, and there is population growth in the suburbs,” says exo’s executive director of customer experience, Marie Hélène Cloutier.
For exo, most of the time this is done without new expenses, in other words, the level of service offered is not modified, but simply more targeted.
And it’s working. In Belœil and Terrebonne, the pilot projects, launched in 2021 and 2022 respectively, have exceeded expectations. In the first case, eight local lines were converted and total ridership has since jumped by 318%, reaching more than 45,220 trips in 2023.
In the second case, the use of on-demand transportation (DRT) increased by almost 500% in just one year and now totals almost 24,000 trips. More encouraging for the carrier, the service helps convince some people to board public transit. In Belœil, 40% of DRT users had never used public transit services. In Terrebonne, where the bus network was slightly improved at the same time, this figure is around 15%.
This allows us to cover new needs. The customer is able to travel to places that he simply could not reach before.
Marie Hélène Cloutier, manager at exo
Projects by the ton
Exo will therefore attempt to replicate this success starting August 19, with a new on-demand transportation service in the Mont-Saint-Hilaire and Otterburn Park sectors. Three local lines – 11, 12 and 22 – will be converted for this purpose. Lines 21 and 23, to the Mont-Saint-Hilaire and McMasterville stations, will remain unchanged. The same goes for line 200.
In total, 90% of the territory of the two cities will be served by on-demand transportation. In fact, only the industrial sectors of Mont-Saint-Hilaire and the new real estate complex in Otterburn Park will not be included in the project, which will be able to count on a midibus vehicle and two sedans.
Users will be able to book their trip up to seven days in advance. As in Belœil, dozens of “virtual stops” will be added in Mont-Saint-Hilaire and Otterburn Park in the coming days. These are predetermined locations where customers can book directly in the app.
“This allows us to be much more flexible and to offer even more service. The range of our offer in these two cities, until now, was from 7:45 a.m. to 7 p.m. before. From now on, we will be able to serve people from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., so there is a significant gain in frequency,” notes Mme Cloutier.
For the future, his group aims to develop “one to two” TAD projects per year.
We will go there in stages and gradually, but we definitely want to continue. For the moment, since we are not in a financial situation that allows it, we will focus on sectors that do not require additional services.
Marie Hélène Cloutier, manager at exo
She does not rule out, however, accelerating the pace once negotiations have been settled in the longer term with the Legault government on the financing of public transport. For the moment, the announcement of another sector that will join the on-demand transport project is already planned for the fall.
Exo is the first transportation company to transform a local offer into on-demand transportation, but it is not the first to test this practice. In 2021, the Société de transport de Montréal tested the MUVE on-demand service (SALD), a pilot project testing a new mobile application for booking a shared taxi in the Senneville and Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue areas.
At the time, the project had “contributed to improving the service,” the company stated, with more than 85% of users appreciating the service. Other on-demand transportation projects have also been carried out in Laval, Longueuil and Quebec City, among others.