Yale University offers night time safe shuttle rides to students between 6pm and 6am. I used the service several times between 2015 and 2017. It was similar to an Uber pool ride that I had prepaid for along with my tuition. It was extremely useful and yet a terrible experience. It was an absolute pain calling a number and waiting for the dispatcher to pick up my phone. On busy nights with parties in town, it used to take more than an hour for the ride to arrive. There were times when my friends who could afford an Uber ride would just order one to get somewhere and I would wait for the shuttle because I was tied to it. While researching Pantonium and the problem that it is trying to solve, I learnt that there is a term to describe my situation, it is called ‘Transport poverty’.
I am super excited to share what Pantonium is doing and how their software is extremely relevant today when we have an ongoing conversation in our society about inequity, and bridging the gap.
Origin and the business
Founded in 2009 by Remi Desa and Khun Yee Fung, Pantonium Inc aims to move people efficiently in an on-demand world. Below is how they describe themselves and what they do:
Pantonium is artificially intelligent route optimization software for fleets of vehicles providing shared people transportation. Pantonium's AI dispatch system is connected to riders and drivers via mobile applications to track vehicle locations and rider trip requests in real-time. The whole platform is designed to find globally optimal routes and schedules in seconds. Pantonium is currently used in the following use cases: public transit, medical transportation, student transport, ridesharing, and carpooling.
What does that really mean?
Let me unpack that for you. Pantonium builds software that can power Yale’s shuttle service. Not just that their software can help cities run transit systems that don’t run on fixed routes or at fixed times but can be on-demand i.e. a city resident can request a ride at a time of their choosing from any location within the city. City or municipality buses can act like Uber pool rides.
What’s the problem here? Don’t we already have transit systems?
No we don’t. Not all of us have the same support from our cities. Our cities and municipalities are currently failing to provide equitable transit services to all the residents.
People with socioeconomic disadvantages rely more heavily on public transit. If you have the economic means to own a car or call an Uber/taxi, you wouldn’t be willing to wait in a queue at a bus stop for a public bus when it is snowing in Toronto. Even if you don’t own a car yourself but have the social circle of friends and family that own a car, you can rely on them to help you get from point A to point B if there isn’t public transit between those two points. But when you don’t have the economic and social capital and there isn’t public transit available between point A and B, what would you do? Essentially you are going through ‘Transport poverty’.
To make it more real, here’s a map created by Professor Steven Farber and his team at University of Toronto, that has been working on figuring out the value of on-demand transit. In red are pockets of Toronto where he has found people in ‘Transport poverty’. These are locations where clusters of low income population are living with low levels of transit accessibility. This results in suppressed levels of daily out of home activity participation. These activities could be someone going for work, buying groceries or general recreation. A typical Torontonian might make 2 or more out of home activities per day (pre-COVID). In these pockets people are doing 1 or less activity per day. This lack of activity doesn’t just impact economic levels but also well being of individuals living in these pockets.
When one moves away from densely populated city centers towards the suburbs, the frequency of public transit changes. It is because of a few reasons:
Not every municipality has the same resources. Just like a city has affluent and poor neighborhoods, there are cities that are economically better than others.
Even when a suburb has the financial resources, it isn’t economically viable and even prudent to run buses at a fixed frequency late at night or on weekends.
Also, areas with different activity levels need disproportional resource allocation. It isn’t feasible to run a bus through every street at a fixed interval every day.
So how is Pantonium helping here?
Pantonium’s software is helping municipalities move from fixed services to a model that resembles that of Uber pool. A resident can use an app to request a ride and a transit bus would show up to pick them and will drop them at their destination. And the software optimizes the route based on traffic, real time requests from other residents etc. There are a couple of advantages that I can see:
It would lower the costs of running the transit for the city as they no longer have to run buses on a fixed schedule on routes with low usage. A bus only has to go when there is a rider requesting a ride. This would not only reduce fuel consumption but would also likely increase vehicle utilization and vehicle years given the wasteful miles are reduced.
Cities can expand their service areas and include neighborhoods that have been traditionally under-served because they were much farther from the city center which can increase ridership and therefore city’s revenue.
It would be a big win for rider convenience and experience.
What is exciting about Pantonium?
Operational efficiency - Any service that can bring operational efficiency to an outdated, inefficient transit system should win in the long term. Pantonium has completed a successful pilot with the City of Belleville in Eastern Ontario and has recently signed contracts with a couple other small towns. As residents start using the service and cities get to see a real change in their revenue and costs, I believe the team will be able to ride on the initial results and will convince others to sign up and expand their business.
Not just transit - Pantonium’s software isn’t only for transits but also private schools and hospitals and anyone who is looking to transport people. That means that if Pantonium invests in a sales team that can focus on aggressive outbound, the business can diversify revenue sources. This also means fewer interactions with bureaucracy.
Making real change happen - This is a business that has the potential to create real change. Think how railroads transformed the world because it brought economic prosperity to areas that were connected by rails. A business that can pull people out of transport poverty will have a far reaching impact on the economic and social well being of its consumers and the cities that it serves. This sort of social good in itself is super exciting to me.
What makes me nervous about Pantonium?
Difficult stakeholders - Working with any government body is hard. Dealing with bureaucracy and public servants for a small team isn’t going to be easy especially when a large part of their role would be to educate municipalities about the tools to increase adoption. It is a very tough challenge. There are going to be tenders and long drawn pilot programs and research projects. How long will a small start-up survive?
Technological challenges - A quick glance on Pantonium’s app on Google play tells me that there are a lot of disgruntled riders who have had terrible experience trying to use the app, either because it didn’t tell them the right ETA or didn’t even let them login. Poor rider experience from a service that is attempting to bring convenience to riders is a bummer. I hope that these unhappy customers are a small percentage of their total customer base.
I also hope that Pantonium overcomes the challenges and continues to thrive.
That’s all for now :)
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