Column: Testing out Bloomington’s new BLink microtransit service

Last week, on Monday, Bloomington Transit launched a new on-demand service called BLink.

Using the BLink app, from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, passengers can request a ride between any of three zones inside the city of Bloomington—North, East, and Downtown. The pickup window is a half hour long. Drivers will wait up to five minutes on a passenger.

Passengers can also book these zone-to-zone rides up to 24 hours in advance. The fare for the new service is $2. The regular fixed route fare is $1.

At last Tuesday evening’s BT board meeting, Shelley Strimaitis, who is BT’s planning and special projects manager, gave an update on the new service. No rides had been taken for the first two days of the BLink service.

That was likely due in part, to the fact that BT has not aggressively marketed the service, yet, beyond a post to BT’s Facebook page. Strimaitis said that a direct mailing would be sent out, once the flyers have been printed.

A microtransit service like BLink, has the potential to help residents get to the places they need to go, faster and easier—places like work, medical appointments, school, job interviews, court appointments, childcare centers, or government offices.

But to test out the service on Friday, starting from my downtown apartment, I chose a pretty low-stakes mission—Bruster’s Real Ice Cream on the eastern edge of town.

Judged only by the standard of the number of strawberry sundaes enjoyed (+1), Friday’s mission counted as a solid success. But there are more standards than just ice cream.

Screenshots from the outbound trip

In chronological sequence (left-to-right, then down to the next row, left-to-right again), here’s some screenshots from my phone for the outbound trip.

Here’s a breakdown of timepoints for the outbound trip:

Outbound Trip

• Booked ride at: 2:30 p.m.
• Walked a quarter mile from home to pickup point.
• Window for pickup: 2:55 p.m. to 3:25 p.m. (Could have chosen 2:35 to 3:05 p.m.)
• Picked up at: 2:56 p.m.
• Paid $2 with TokenTransit
• Arrived at Bruster’s: 3:08 p.m.

From the time I booked the trip at 2:30 p.m. until I arrived at Bruster’s, 38 minutes went by. That’s OK, but I would say not excellent. I might have improved on it by making a different choice from the two rides that were offered when I booked.

One ride choice departed from “Near 108 W 4th Street” and the other departed from “Transit Center Transfer”. The difference was that the 4th Street location had a half-hour pickup window from 2:35 p.m. to 3:05 p.m. The ride I chose had a half-hour pickup window that started 20 minutes later—from 2:55 p.m. to 3:25 p.m.

Why did I pick the later time? Because I was not certain where exactly 108 W. 4th Street is, or why that was offered as a choice.

I knew that there are exactly three points that are designated for pickups and dropoffs in the Downtown Zone—the BT transit center at 3rd and Walnut, Bloomington city hall, and the Seminary Park Kroger. So I was skeptical of the 4th Street location that the app was offering me.

Note: The BLink pickup location from the transit center is not in the bus bays for fixed-route buses. It’s at the bus stop on 3rd Street, right next to the transit center.

Given the 2:55 p.m. to 3:25 p.m window, the 2:56 arrival time of the vehicle has to count as excellent. The driver, Rodney, told me he had picked up one other BLink passenger that day, in the morning. Other trips he had made were for paratransit riders. The BLink service and the paratransit service run off the same platform.

Note: Fastening your seatbelt is a requirement for the vehicles that are used for BLink service.

Note: You can pay $2 cash for rides or with the TokenTransit app. There’s an option to purchase $2 BLink rides with TokenTransit. For background on TokenTransit, see: Column: What I learned about paying fares by riding a Bloomington Transit bus

After getting a strawberry sundae from the window at Bruster’s I parked myself on a bench to book the return trip. The time from booking the trip to arriving downtown was about 2 hours.

If my wait for the pickup window had not been spent sitting on a bench, eating ice cream in the shade on a sunny day, at 80 F degrees with less than 50 percent humidity, but instead standing in cold rain, fretting about a high-stakes errand I had to complete, I am sure I would have been frustrated.

Here’s a breakdown of timepoints for the inbound trip:

Inbound Trip

• Booked ride at: 3:16 p.m.
• Window for pickup: 4:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.
• RIDE CANCELLATION GLITCH
• Picked up at: 5:04
• Paid $2 with TokenTransit
• Arrived at Transit Center: 5:17 p.m.
• Walked a quarter mile home from Transit Center

Here’s the details on the ride cancellation gitch. With an ETA of about 6 minutes for my pickup from Morningside Drive (that’s the nearest pickup point to Bruster’s), I got a phone call with “Bloomington Transit” indicated on my screen. It was a BT dispatcher, who explained that I was about to see a “Ride Canceled” message on the BLink app.

The cancellation was something the dispatcher put into the system, because she needed to manually redirect the driver who was going to pick me up, to pick up a different rider. The dispatcher also rebooked my ride.

The point of the phone call was to reduce the chances I would freak out when I saw the message about the ride getting canceled. I did not freak out when I saw it, because I had just received a phone call. That goes into the win column for the dispatcher.

The end effect of the cancellation and rebooking was a bit of delay for me. Judged against the end of the original half-hour pick-up window, the pick up time of 5:04 p.m. was 4 minutes late.

But the thing that burned the most time for the return leg of the trip was the time between booking and the start of the pickup window—1 hour and 15 minutes.

When I asked Strimaitis about that, she said that from 7–8:30 a.m. and 3:30–5 p.m. is a busy time for the service—because there are a lot of paratransit passengers that travel to and from Stone Belt every day around those times.

Strimaitis indicated that usually the further out you book a ride (up to 24 hours in advance) the better options you will receive from the app.

Takeaways

One big takeaway from Friday’s trial run is this: BLink is not like a personal chauffeur, that allows you to book a ride on a spontaneous whim and expect to be picked up in the next few minutes.

If you know you’re going to be making a trip the next day, it’s probably worth booking your ride up to 24-hours in advance.

It’s not always feasible, but if you know you have a high-stakes trip coming up, then it might be worth trying out the BLink service with a lower-stakes trip. It doesn’t have to be ice cream.