Edmonton On Demand Transit 4+

Where I live there are no buses so the only thing I can use is bud on demand and I end up always being late for school I book like 20min ahead and where I’m going to is only 5 minutes away from the stop so I end up waiting 20min for the bud to show up even tho it says 4 min I wish there was a way to contact them

The service is dysfunctional asf, the drivers don’t even bother being on time and they like to drive as slow as they can in the summer. They take loops in my neighbourhood just to hold us up and the app itself doesn’t even work. It’s always laggy, it takes no input, it cancel rides and allat. Even the service centre is garbage, they don’t pick up calls and if they do, some of them are rude, they don’t listen at all. This is my only way to get to school and I’m late EVERYDAY no matter how EARLY I book any busses. They make me wait for 1 or 2 trips for the transit centre to my neighbourhood and then they finally let me on the bus 20-40 minutes after I book. Again, it drains matter when I book because it’s like this ALL the time. I have to keep wasting my money in Uber all the time because your service is so garbage, I’m late to school everyday because you guys can’t do your jobs

When the service works properly it’s great, it can be much quicker than any other bus. Provided you’re going to or from a specific transit center. The good qualities stop there though.

Unless you’re travelling at times where it’s not busy, good luck getting a bus at the right time. The waits easily exceed 30+ minutes, and there’s no way of knowing to prepare to leave for a bus in 5 minutes or 35 minutes. There’s no good way to plan a trip, except blindly hoping for a bus. The available buses are very limited too, offering one or maybe two options at a time. There’s no way to deny a bus you can’t get to in time to book the next one. Just wait for the bus to get taken and pray.

Even more frustratingly, you’ll find a bus that comes relatively soon, so you book it and get ready to go to the stop. Only when you check how far away it is, the bus hasn’t moved in 10 minutes. Now you’re forced to wait for the driver to see the ride and start moving, or cancel and try for another bus. 9/10 times, you’ll just get the same bus that isn’t moving. If the driver is on their break that’s fine, but they need to turn off their ability to accept rides. It wouldn’t be as bad if there was at least a reasonable estimate of how long it will take, instead the time stays the same or fluctuates by a couple minutes while the bus doesn’t move.

Overall the app is very slow, compared to what it used to be before it got updated. The service is frustrating and unreliable, making planning a trip near impossible without at least extra 30 minutes to get a decent bus. Despite some good experiences when the service was much newer, the app and the service provide a 1 star experience.