DCTA’s GoZone ride-share sets record with one million completed rides

Credit: Denton County Transportation Authority

The Denton County Transportation Authority (DCTA) has announced that its GoZone on-demand ride-share service has now surpassed one million completed rides in approximately 18 months of service. 

“The one-millionth completed ride for GoZone is a truly remarkable achievement, and it represents an incredible amount of work our teams have accomplished in only 18 months,” said Paul A. Cristina, CEO of DCTA. “The strong success of GoZone has placed DCTA among the top 25 transit agencies in the United States supplying demand-response micro-transit service.”

GoZone had first launched in September 2021 with a fleet of dedicated minivans providing safe, affordable and efficient transportation options to residents in Denton, Lewisville and Highland Village, through a mobile app-based service. The results were immediate, with more than 640,000 rides completed in its first year. Since then, demand has steadily increased, as GoZone set a record with more than 71,000 rides having been completed in one month (January 2023), making it one of the most popular on-demand public transit services in the nation.

The on-demand service has also proven to be a great way to connect to other modes of transit, with a survey from spring 2022 showing that more than a third of GoZone riders have reported that they use the service to connect with DCTA’s other public transit modes. 

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GoZone had been launched with the aim to expand the community’s access to equitable public transportation in an affordable way by deploying easy-to-use technology. Since launching, the service has effectively worked towards achieving this goal, with:

• A total of 80% of trips being to-and-from essential destinations, such as grocery stores, healthcare, schools, workplaces, social services or other transit hubs
• A total of 42% of GoZone customers reporting their annual income as less than $25,000
• A total of 44% of GoZone customers identifying as people of colour
• A total of 71% of GoZone customers not owning a personal car.

According to Javier Trilla, DCTA Assistant Vice President for IT and Innovation, GoZone has also made consistent improvements in operational quality in recent months, with great gains in the rate of rides that have been completed, in the numbers of people that have been moved per hour and in on-time performance.