Open Fleets: The 'Plug & Play' Solution for Seamless Transit Integration

To accommodate rising demand, staff shortages and operational costs, over the last ten years agencies have begun to consider public/private partnerships by looking to send trip demand to external fleet providers. While this makes a ton of sense in theory, it is much harder to implement in practice–it comes with an overhead of managing multiple systems and a lack of real-time visibility into the live operations of their fleet providers. Open Fleets is a part of Spare’s software infrastructure designed to connect trip demand to any fleet provider, like taxi companies and transportation networking companies (TNCs), on one centralized platform. It makes unifying multiple fleets easy for transit agencies, regardless of who is operating them through a proven native integration with the software of the fleet provider.

The Open Fleets Layer: Plug & Play

Computers were first invented so we wouldn’t have to perform repetitive tasks. Although we’ve come a long way from that, the same principle applies to Spare’s unique Open Fleets infrastructure.

Historically, integrating with a fleet provider software has been challenging and time consuming, but with the new Open Fleets architecture, we eliminate the repetition. It now takes weeks rather than months to launch with any fleet provider of your choice. Open Fleets is built as a communication layer on top of the Spare open ecosystem and serves as a plug & play model. Capabilities, such as live trip monitoring, scheduling, automated dispatch, reporting, and more are abstracted and come out of the box with it.

Spare’s engineering team or any external developers only need to “plug” in information from the fleet provider software and add any additional configurations per the needs of the agency, through a set-up that’s quick, streamlined, and simple. The result is that Open Fleets can match supply with demand or fill service gaps within communities.

Rapidly Growing Fleet Providers

Spare launched Open Fleets in December 2021 and as of today it remains the only mobility management platform to have real-time integration and live operations with any of Lyft, UZURV, Uber, Taxi Fleets with MTI Dispatch, or Jagwire Dispatch. These fleets represent over 90% of the bookable fleets available in North America.  Thanks to the plug & play model of Open Fleets, our integration with fleet providers is steadily growing. For many of our transit partners, it’s not only possible to have a real-time integration with any fleet provider of their choice–it’s also possible for agencies to tap into existing fleet providers that we already have on the Spare platform. This is a powerful pool of fleet resources that agencies can easily leverage if local conditions, fleet availability, and transit network can benefit from such a mixed fleet model.

Intelligent Trip Brokering

With Open Fleets, agencies have full flexibility over how services are configured. Unlike traditional trip brokering, staff can set up rules for how different fleets, dedicated or non-dedicated, can be optimized against one another, customizing Spare’s advanced routing and dispatch algorithm to minimize costs and rider wait times. Examples of parameters available to control intelligent trip brokering are: setting priority order between fleets, predicted wait times for each fleet, trip cost, trip distance, accessibility needs of riders, passenger count, and & monthly budget.

Spare Open Fleets streamlines the integration process and ultimately makes it easier to match supply with demand in real-time.  As the transportation sector continues to evolve, solutions like Open Fleets highlight the importance of adaptable, integrated, and efficient systems in ensuring the future of effective transit solutions.