Juan Matute, deputy director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, spoke to Spectrum News about L.A. Metro’s new on-demand rideshare service. Metro Micro allows passengers to summon a ride within a designated service area for $1 per trip. The program will launch in the Watts/Willowbrook and LAX/Inglewood areas. If successful, it will expand into four additional neighborhoods next summer. “Metro will learn much more about where people actually want to go from and to, and when they want to do it,” Matute said. “With a fixed-route bus, you know where you pick them up and go, but you don’t know how far they walked or if they used some other device.” While other transit agencies have tried similar on-demand services and failed, Matute explained that Metro has enough money to experiment without putting the agency itself at risk.
Deputy Director, UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies; Lecturer in Urban Planning
Juan researches public transit, transportation finance and governance, new mobility, and parking. He led UCLA’s work on two strategic transit...
