MARTA Reach On-Demand Transit

MARTA — the regional authority serving the City of Atlanta plus Fulton, DeKalb and Clayton counties — ran a six-month on-demand shuttle pilot from 1 March to 31 August 2022 in which riders hailed a branded van by app or phone to a virtual stop, with a cloud dispatch platform built at Georgia Tech routing the request and stitching the ride into the fixed bus and rail network. Over 132 service days it carried 8,332 riders on 7,596 requests, most of them multimodal connections to rail, and MARTA ended it on schedule even though ridership had grown 61% in the final month. The evaluation was written by the Georgia Tech team that designed the system, with MARTA staff among the authors, and it is unusually candid: 33.9% of requests were cancelled and the full shuttle fleet was online for only 12.82% of scheduled service hours. MARTA relaunched Reach as a permanent service on 7 March 2026 across twelve zones, 18 hours a day on RideCo software, with a 30-minute pickup promise and the standard $2.50 fare — running on leased Ford Starcraft vans, because the Ram ProMasters it had bought were under a manufacturer recall.