Chicago Transit Authority’s Bikesharing App Demonstration Study Provides Lessons on Planning, Partnerships, and Implementation.
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Mobility on Demand (MOD) Sandbox Demonstration: Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Ventra–Divvy Integration Case Study
Summary Information
The Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) Mobility on Demand (MOD) Sandbox effort developed around a vision of a multimodal, integrated, automated, accessible, and connected transportation. FTA selected 11 MOD Sandbox Demonstration projects that aimed to advance the MOD vision. This study documented lessons learned from one of these projects, namely the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) MOD Sandbox Demonstration, called Ventra–Divvy Integration, which incorporated a bikesharing company into an existing, contactless open fare payment System named Ventra, first introduced by CTA in 2013. The project made two modifications to the Ventra app in two separate phases to provide customers with improved access to Divvy bikes and establish a platform to expand this opportunity to other shared modes in the future. In Phase 1, completed in September 2020, Divvy station locations and system status information were incorporated into the Ventra trip planner to allow customers to check real-time availability of bikes at transit stops and the availability of docking stations at their destination. In Phase 2, additional bikesharing functionalities were integrated into the Ventra app so customers can pay for their bike trip with their Ventra transit value or other payment source to receive an unlock code. This study shed light on institutional challenges encountered in the Phase 1, payment integration and unbanked access as part of Phase 2, and included lessons learned and recommended practices identified from this demonstration. Lessons highlighted in this study were obtained through interviews conducted with project partners (expert interviews) in October 2020, a month after the implementation.
- Stay ready to handle unexpected risks that may arise from public-private partnerships, like mergers and acquisitions. The stakeholders involved in this project encountered similar problems but worked through them diligently to ensure continuity in vendor transition through consistency of staff, effective communication, and commitment to the initial scope and goals of the MOD initiative.
- Understand that the integration of trip planning and fare payment can be a prolonged process.. The creation of a seamless multimodal system involves combining various technologies, partnerships, and customer segments. As seen in the CTA MOD Sandbox demonstration, it's crucial to methodically address the different challenges to achieve a unified system that efficiently blends trip planning and fare payment services.
- Expect tradeoffs between program pace and efficiency. In the case of CTA, the partners involved in the study slowed down their timeline, resulting in delay mostly attributable to external factors/ vendors.
- Show internal due-diligence. Since many public agencies lack in-house technical expertise on fare payment and trip planning integration, interviewees in this study recommended that future program grantees conduct an internal public-private partnership feasibility assessment before the start of a project.
- Standardize for an across-the-board consistency in implementation. Project partners involved in this study emphasized that FTA could assist with mobility innovation by developing a common interface and fare payment standard that all public transit systems and mobility service providers could utilize, similar to General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards.
