Product Roadmap: What's next

The refreshed Driver Page makes it easier for dispatchers and operations teams to find key driver information quickly, with less scrolling and a cleaner layout. New Driver Performance KPIs are now available directly in the driver profile, providing real-time insights to monitor behavior, address issues, and take immediate action.

These improvements help agencies manage driver performance more efficiently and maintain high operational standards.

Driver Cancellation Policies give agencies the flexibility to decide whether drivers can cancel requests or mark riders as no-shows directly in the driver app or if cancellations must go through a dispatcher. This setting helps ensure proper procedures are followed, such as waiting the required time, contacting the rider, and verifying the pickup location, ultimately maintaining high service standards.
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Available within the Dispatch Pro package for enhanced trip management. Speak to your Partner Success Manager to learn more. 

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Riders can now book recurring trips directly from the rider app! Whether it’s a weekly grocery store run, regular medical appointments, or a daily commute, riders can easily set up trips that repeat on their schedule. This update makes it more convenient for riders to manage their transportation needs while helping agencies improve the overall rider experience. Agencies can choose to enable this feature to give riders more control while keeping full oversight over recurring bookings.

‍Please contact your Spare representative to learn more.

Riders calling an agency’s AI Voice system no longer need a pre-existing account to access on-demand transit. If the system doesn’t recognize their number, it will guide them through the agency’s registration process, making it seamless for visitors or first-time riders to create an account anytime, even outside call center hours. This enhancement expands access to on-demand transit, ensuring more riders can use your services effortlessly.

Provide a tailored rider experience with precise zone visibility. The rider app now displays only the zones and stops relevant to each rider’s eligibility. Microtransit riders see only microtransit zones, while paratransit riders see their designated areas and stops—ensuring a seamless booking experience for all riders.

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Now it’s easier than ever for booking agents to handle trips with multiple legs, like those that combine on-demand and fixed-route services. When you enter a rider’s origin, destination, and trip time in Spare Launch, you’ll see clear multimodal journey options. These options show everything you need—pickup times, transfer points, and the rider’s final destination details. If the trip includes on-demand legs, you can book them right in the platform, making sure the rider’s journey is smooth from start to finish.

Spare now offers an improved integration with Stripe Connect, making it easier for transit agencies to set up and manage Stripe as their payment provider. This streamlined process minimizes setup headaches and ensures agencies can quickly configure their accounts, avoiding the high per-transaction fees traditionally associated with Stripe. Agencies benefit from smoother operations, fewer payment-related issues, and enhanced visibility into transaction management—delivering a better payment experience for both agencies and riders.

Effortlessly enforce cancellation and suspension policies with automated workflows tailored to your agency’s rules. Spare’s Workflows let you automatically track and act on rider behaviors such as repeated no-shows or frequent cancellations and rebookings to manipulate pickup times. For example, set up rules to issue temporary suspensions after a set number of no-shows or late cancellations, ensuring consistent enforcement without manual intervention. This automation streamlines operations, reduces disruptions, and ensures fairness for all riders while freeing staff to focus on more critical tasks.

Welcome your riders with a personalized onboarding experience that sets the stage for a smooth journey. With configurable Rider Guides in Spare Rider, agencies can create tailored instructions using images and text to highlight key details like how to use the app, service availability, meeting drivers at pickup locations, and more. Empower riders to feel confident and prepared from their very first trip. Riders are automatically guided through your custom onboarding when they first download the app, and they can revisit the Rider Guide anytime through the Help section under the Account menu.

Spare Tickets simplifies fare management by allowing transit agencies to configure custom ticket types, durations, and pricing for different rider groups. Riders can easily purchase, activate, and use tickets via the app with flexible payment options. Integrated into service planning, Spare Tickets supports zone-based fares, passes, and detailed activity tracking, enhancing convenience for both agencies and riders.

Spare's new Google/Apple Pay integration with Stripe in the rider app is a seamless integration that enables riders to make payments effortlessly using Stripe's secure processing capabilities. If Apple Pay or Google Pay is set up in the transit agency's Stripe account, riders can now use these payment options directly under the Payments section in the app, creating a faster, more convenient payment experience.

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Enhance every trip with our Pickup and Dropoff Location Notes feature! This tool allows riders and admins to add detailed instructions directly to trip locations, such as gate codes, parking directions, and suite numbers, ensuring drivers have all the necessary details for a smooth pickup or dropoff.

This reduces delays, prevents no-shows, and minimizes frustration by improving accuracy and communication between riders and drivers. Make every journey smoother and more efficient with precise, easily accessible location notes.

Open Fleets is a powerful tool for managing overflow capacity at your agency. But what happens when it's too powerful? When ridership increases dramatically due to the increased supply in your service? In order to help you grow sustainably, we're introducing Fleet Limits. Set restrictions on which trips can be assigned to particular fleets to ensure that the right rides reach external fleets while keeping your dedicated vehicles full, such as customization of criteria, such as:

- Trip distance

- Acceptable payment methods

- Accessibility features

- Maximum trips assigned to by fleet and rider

- Cost

Ensure that budgets stay in check while still providing low wait times for your riders!

With Eligibility Appointment Scheduling, administrators can manage, track next steps and coordinate in-person assessments directly in the same platform they use for eligibility—no more paper or spreadsheets. Appointments sync effortlessly with their chosen calendar, like Outlook, Google, or Yahoo, reducing manual work and enhancing efficiency for both staff and clients.

Vehicle Type Restrictions elevate how transit agencies deliver personalized, accessible service. By matching riders with vehicles that suit their specific mobility needs—such as ensuring individuals who can’t navigate steps are assigned to cars instead of vans—agencies can create seamless travel experiences for every passenger. This capability allows agencies to define vehicle types, assign them across the fleet, and apply rider-specific restrictions with ease.

Riders can now track their driver’s exact route in the rider app with real-time polylines that follow the roads drivers are taking toward pickup and drop-off locations. This update enhances transparency and reduces confusion, giving riders a clear and accurate view of their trip progress.

Meet Reports Copilot: an intuitive tool in Spare Analytics that helps you create customized reports in seconds. Simply describe the report you need—like tracking drivers who are late to collect—and Copilot will intelligently select relevant data fields, generate a name and description, and save it to your custom reports library. Effortlessly refine your reports or export them with ease, saving time and boosting productivity for your team.

Transit agencies can now send tailored notifications to riders based on their service type—paratransit or microtransit—all within the same organization. This enhancement ensures riders receive clear, relevant communication specific to their needs, reducing confusion and improving the overall rider experience without adding operational complexity.

In order to make it easier to manage your services and any service changes, we're now supporting the ability to import and export service zones using geoJSON format. This feature is an expansion on the existing support for importing ShapeFiles.

Do you have drivers or fleets, such as taxis or other transit agencies, that you'd like to include in your service but can't because they're not in your organization? We're making the impossible possible with a new feature: Shared Fleets.

With Shared Fleets, any organization on Spare can share their fleet with another organization. For example, a taxi company can share their fleet with a transit agency. Or a transit agency, can share their fleet with another transit agency! Once a fleet is shared, it can accept trips from the other organization, however only minimal data is shared. With Shared Fleets the possibilities are endless. 🚀

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Sometimes it can be difficult for drivers to find riders, especially on more specialized services like paratransit. While Spare Driver does a great job at directing drivers to the right locations, a phone call can sometimes clear things up in an instant. This is what led us to introduce a new add-on for Spare Platform, Driver ↔ Rider Calling.

With this add-on, you can empower your drivers with the ability to call riders directly from the Spare Driver app. This is done entirely anonymously over Voice Over IP (VOIP). #hotlinebling

This feature is available in our Voice Package. Contact your Spare representative to learn more.

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Transit services require driving during the day and night. It only make sense that the apps Drivers use should support safe driving at all times of day. Dark Mode for Spare Driver is a new update to the same driver experience you know and love, this time meticulously reworked to maximize safety for nighttime driving. Whether you set it to always be dark, or to change automatically based on the time of day, your drivers are now in control of what the app looks like.

Dark Mode is available to all drivers using Spare Driver.

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Do you want to know what's happening with your services without going to Spare Analyze? Now you can! Introducing Weekly and Daily Service Reports.

Weekly and Daily reports will come automatically to your inboxes on a daily and weekly interval. Daily Reports will give you just the small bites of information you want on a daily basis, while Weekly Reports provide operational insights and KPIs that help drive service improvements! You might even hear from your operations manager through your weekly report 😜.

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Administrators can now quickly create and edit recurring trip schedules for riders! Recurring Trips will automatically schedule a trip request on Spare Platform. This works with all service and operational models available today on Spare.

This feature is only available in our Rider Pro package. Please contact your Spare representative to learn more.

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Do you support multiple organizations for your services? Spare Rider white-label app will soon support fast discovery of nearby organizations and multiple services. Riders will be shown a organizations that are nearby, and can quickly select the service that fits their need.

We've heard your feedback and doubled down on an incredible in-trip experience for riders using Spare Rider or any Spare Rider white-labeled app. Apart from beautiful new graphics and an upgraded Spare Car™️ icon, there is a whole host of new functionality coming to riders.

Riders will now be able to see a detailed timeline of their trip, including walking times and estimated travel times in vehicle. We will even inform riders of what stage the current trip is in.

Riders will also now be able to change the number of passengers on their booking and see the payment method used when they created their trip.

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Accepting credit cards through phone-in bookings can be complicated. Up until now, it has required a PCI-compliant call center and complicated interactions between customers and call center agents. This has all changed with Spare Pay IVR.

Call center agents can now trigger Spare Pay IVR, directly from inside the booking flow. The process is seamless and provides call center agents real-time feedback on the rider's progress.

This feature is available in our Voice Package. Contact your Spare representative to learn more.

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Different fleets require different wait times. You can now set how long you would like your drivers to wait for a rider once they arrive at a pickup. After the wait is over, they will be prompted to extend the wait time, or mark the passenger as a "no show".

For certain service types, consistency is key. Some riders will prefer to take trips with the same driver, co-passengers, and at the same time on a day to day basis. This will now be possible with a new flag on services called Prioritize Trip Consistency.

This flag will work behind the scenes to create trips for riders that feel familiar. Under the hood Spare will be looking at key characteristics from past trips and try to create a similar experience, without significantly reducing efficiency. This configuration will be especially useful for school transportation services and services for people with disabilities.

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Before booking a trip, the estimate is a critical time for riders to choose the service they want, understand pricing, and see where their pickup spot will be. With the next generation of trip estimates for Spare Rider, all this information will be presented in a cleaner and more reliable way.

Riders will now be able to see all services that are available to them, and choose the service they want. They will also be asked to confirm their pickup location, reducing errors in the booking process.

Lastly, the new interface is built for the future in mind with many new features coming down the pipeline for riders using Spare powered services.

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Sometimes you just need to get a message across your riders. For instance, with COVID-19, you may want to inform the rider of guidelines for riding safely on your transportation services. This is now possible with Acknowledge Announcements on Spare Rider.

We’ve added a new option on announcements: Requires Acknowledgement. When checked, the announcement will pop up when riders open the app, and riders must click an OK button to continue. The announcement will still be accessible in the normal announcements area of the rider app, but it won’t pop up again after a rider has seen it once.

This feature is only available in our Rider Pro package. Please contact your Spare representative to learn more.

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Every transit agency and mobility provider is unique. There is often information that, if collected from riders, could improve rider experiences using your services. This is why we are releasing the ability to customize your user onboarding experience in Spare Rider. 🎉

You will now be able to manage custom fields on the rider profile screen and enable this to be collected from riders when they are signing up for your services or updating their account. This can be used for a variety of use cases, including card numbers for eligibility, collecting date of birth, or even connecting mobile ticketing account numbers to consolidate payments. This new feature will enable you to customize your app and services even more in order to meet the needs of your customers.

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While on-time performance metrics have always been available in Spare Analyze, we're now bringing these numbers front and center with a new home in Spare Analyze. These changes will include improved calculations to increase on-time performance metric accuracy, and also include reporting capabilities for these metrics.

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As a driver, you might want to use another app, but still receive requests from Spare. This will now be possible. Introducing: Request Offer Notifications.

No matter what app you're using, Spare Driver will now be able to send you offer notifications for new trip request opportunities. Simply tap the notification and accept the offer in the app.

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Groups have transformed how services can be provided to riders. With groups today, riders can have access to targeted services that are not available to the general public. Spare is building on this success with Advanced Rider Group Memberships!

With these updates, groups will support a whole new set of use cases. You can use groups for eligibility management through membership expiry dates. Automatic notifications will keep administrators and riders up to date with the status of their membership. And administrators will be able to manage group service level access from right inside of Spare Launch.

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Microtransit and paratransit services have traditionally lived in silos. There was very little visibility into where the services operate and they always required a separate app to search for. At Spare, we have worked to break down these silos and build holistically integrated transit services, all the way from paratransit and microtransit to high-speed rail.

Spare Platform enables anyone to easily integrate these services through Spare Open API. Coming soon, select services will now be available through Transit App, one of the world's largest transit aggregators. If you are interested in having your microtransit services available through Transit App contact us or contact your operations manager at Spare.

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Ready to go beyond the basics of Spare Platform administration? Want to customize your organization, push its boundaries, and enhance its functionality? You can do that and so much more without writing a single line of code. All you need is your mouse and a sense of adventure. Enhance your riders, drivers services and more with Field Manager.

Field Manager enables your system to fit the unique needs of your users. Spare lets you customize your object model with features like custom fields. These fields can store any type of information, such as text, dates, checkbox values, and multi-selects. You can use custom fields to store specific information on users, such as date of birth, or their paratransit ID number, or you can customize your services with custom fields that help differentiate how they operate.

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With Spare Rider we're looking at making it as easy as possible to help riders take trips from point A to point B. One thing we've continued to hear feedback on is walking directions. Well, we're excited to announce that we will be launching walking directions in Spare Rider! 🎉 Have a location where you don't want these available - not a problem. Walking directions can be toggled on each service.

This feature is only available in our Rider Pro package. Please contact your Spare representative to learn more.

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Looking to enable your riders to show that extra bit of appreciation after the trip? With Driver Tipping, you now can!

Riders will now be able to tip directly from the app after every trip. They will be able to add percentage-based tips or enter a custom amount to really show their appreciation. Even better - the new tipping experience occurs during the review process. You can even trigger a notification to help remind your riders to leave a tip.

Have some services that you want to enable tipping and others that you don't? No problem - just toggle tipping for the services that you want.

This feature is only available in our Driver Pro package. Please contact your Spare representative to learn more.

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There has never been a mobility platform that enabled incredible flexibility, and extremely high efficiency, both at the same time... until now. Introducing Spare Engine V2: Enabling Continuous, High-Efficiency Scheduled Trip Matching.

Spare Engine will now continuously optimize all the scheduled pickups and dropoffs in a trip schedule, maximizing the schedule efficiency, while maintaining the capability to accept on-demand trips.

What this means for you: You can now offer a high efficiency specialized transport service that supports both scheduled trips and up-to-the-minute same-day bookings. This means, no more manual routing of scheduled trips, no more manual trip brokering, no more manual notifications to customers for their trip times. This is now all automated with Spare Engine.

Note: Spare Engine V2 is currently available as an early access release for select customers. Please contact your operations manager to request access.

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Pooling riders onto one vehicle is a great way to reduce operational costs. But you may not always want to allow this (physical distancing requirements for COVID-19 are just one example).  

To turn off the pooling option, ensure that the 'No pooling' flag in Spare Platform is active. Riders using the Spare Rider App will no longer see pooled options when they search for trips.

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Don't have any vehicles in your fleet that can support more than four passengers. No problem!

By toggling on 'Maximum Number of Riders', you can restrict the number of riders the can be booked on a single trip request.

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Want to create a service for a particular group of people? Now this is easy with self-serve service restrictions.

You can quickly decide what group you want to restrict your service to, and add your restrictions in an instant.

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Managing ADA Paratransit eligibility has historically been a very manual task. Most paratransit applications get sent by mail to agencies, and all processing of applications is done manually. To this date, very little of the eligibility and application data has existed in a digital format, making it difficult to provide access control and impossible to automate. This is about to change.

Spare is introducing 100% digital, fully automated eligibility management on Spare Platform. Applications can now be filled out using accessible digital forms, assessments are all handled digitally, and yes... notifications are fully automated.

Don't worry, we know paper forms are here to stay - at least for a while. Eligibility Management on Spare supports paper form upload, and we've introduced a new feature to bridge the gap between paper and digital. We're calling it Smart Scanning.  With Smart Scanning, Spare uses optical character recognition to read a paper form and convert the hand-written text into Spare Platform data. Going digital has never been easier.

You might be used to manually printing acceptance letters, or appeal letters for your applications. With Spare Eligibility Management, the system takes care of this for you. Spare will take your templates and letterhead, convert them to letters and mail them automatically.

There are so many more great features as part of Spare Eligibility management. We can't wait for you to try it out!

Note: ADA Paratransit Eligibility Management is currently available as an early access release for select US customers. Please contact your operations manager to request access.

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Sometimes you may want to display more information about who is picking up your riders inside the rider application. Now that is possible!

You can now toggle on Driver Profile Visible To Riders in Spare Admin and the service information will be replaced with information about the driver, including their name and profile image.

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It takes time to build an easy-to-read, accessible form for your riders. Now, in addition to the online form that already exists, you can download a PDF form that is optimized to work with Spare Smart Scanning. The form is accessible and designed to optimize the form filling experience for your riders. Oh yeah, and it's super quick. You can generate a form in an instant based on your Case Types.

Take more control over how riders tip on your services. With Tip Policy you can do exactly that!

Choose at what prices you display percentage based tips and fixed-rate tips. For instance, for low fares, you may want to display a fixed set of tips, but for high fares, you may want to display using percentages. This will all now be possible with Tip Policy.

This feature is only available in our Driver Pro package. Please contact your Spare representative to learn more.

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Until now, Spare Rider has only been able to support credit card, cash and various mobile ticketing options. This is about to change with increased support for additional payment methods, including SEPA with Strong Customer Authentication (SCA).

We hear your feedback - and we will be bringing pickup time, in addition to dropoff time, to the estimates screen on Spare Rider. Riders will see a pickup estimate for each service as they select through them.

There may be times where you want to have no limits on how far you detour a passenger or item. This could be due to tight restrictions already in place for passengers, such as a fixed route service, or it could be due to transporting non-perishable goods. For these use cases, we are excited to enable a new option for Detour Flexibility called "No Limit".

We're excited to announce Single Sign-On support for Spare.

Single Sign-On, or SSO, provides for greater mitigation controls, empowering you to deactivate users and deny project access to those without the proper user credentials. It also boosts your security by enforcing two-factor authentication and password rotation.

This feature is only available in our Data & Access package. Please contact your Spare representative to learn more.

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In Spare Engage, Cases can now be assigned 🎉.

With the new Assign To feature for Cases, the assigned individual will get notifications upon assignment to notify them they have a new Case to review.

We've also made it easy to understand who is assigned to which case by reviewing the new 'Assigned To' column on the Case Management page. Individuals can also use the Assignment filter to focus their view on only the Cases they're managing.

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Jam packed with innovation, Fare Rules on Spare introduce a whole new way to manage pricing and fares for any mobility service. We know fares can be complicated. With Fare Rules, you can build a fare structure that is unique to your business and can change when you need it.

We've introduced an entirely new way to think about fares with what we're calling Fare Blocks.  With Fare Blocks, everything is possible. You can structure fares to work with any fields or objects on Spare, including custom fields defined in Field Manager. You can also link blocks together. Have different pricing for different zones? Not a problem - simply assign a fare block to a zone.

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Case management in Spare Engage has become even more flexible, with a new custom field to capture a digital signature. Similar to a physical signature at the bottom of a PDF, Spare Engage now supports capturing a digital version of signatures.

Whether you'd like your applicants to acknowledge their information as true and factual, or you're capturing a Doctor's signature on a medical form, the custom signature custom field can be used across all case types!

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We're adding new ways to educate Riders on the carbon footprint of a trip they've taken with Spare. Admins can now choose to display to their riders, in the Rider App, the emissions saved by using pooled services. This data is accessible after a trip has been taken via the Past Trips tab.

Displaying Emissions Details in the Rider App is currently in limited early access preview. Please get in touch with your Spare Partner Success Manager to learn more!

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Drivers can now review their trip history in Spare Driver! Review trips taken for the current day, last 30 days for a month overview, or All Time to get a complete review of all trips taken.

A summary at the top of each time span highlights total trips taken, fare totals, and how much of those fares were tips for the Driver. Below the summary, Drivers can click into each individual trip for a breakdown of the trip, including the service they drove for.

This feature is only available in our Driver Pro package. Please contact your Spare representative to learn more.

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We’re officially certified! Spare becomes the first on-demand transit software provider to be fully SOC-2 and HIPAA compliant.

Read more on how and why we took this step!

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Gain insights on Rider demographics, service satisfaction, and more using Spare Surveys! Using Surveys, Admins can choose from suggested survey templates, or create custom questionnaires from scratch. Once completed, survey responses are aggregated directly in Spare Engage for quick analysis.

Use surveys to boost Rider adoption, understand community demographics, get service feedback, and much more!

Surveys are currently in limited early access preview. Please get in touch with your Spare Partner Success Manager to learn more!

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Creating duty schedules can be hard. With demand changing on a daily basis keeping an up-to-date duty schedule can be challenging and time-consuming.

Generate Duty Schedule automates the process of duty creation by utilizing either past or imported data to create the best schedule for your services. By staying up-to-date with your duty schedule it empowers you to maintain incredible service quality and also drive high efficiency with your operations. ....oh yeah, and it works like magic ✨. Just click the Generate Duties button and you'll have a brand new duty schedule in just a few seconds.

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Create Case workflows that match how you process applications. Add up to 6 custom statuses per Case Type, using custom names and colors per status to differentiate each step in your application process.

A new filter on the All Cases view makes it easy to view a single, or multiple statuses at-a-glance for easier reporting of Case Statuses in a central location.

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Launching connected, commingled fixed route operations just became easy. With Fixed Route Operations, you can set up routes, manage timetables, assign routes to duties and track live operations, all inside of the Spare Launch.

Setting up routes is made easy with automatic travel routing and timetable creation. Assigning routes to duties can be done from Shift Scheduling, so that your fixed route duties can be visualized right next to your on-demand duties. You can even combine a fixed route duty schedule with an on-demand fleet assignment to enable commingled fixed-route and on-demand bookings. 🤯 It has never been easier to get started operating modern fixed route services.

This feature is available in our Multi Modal Package. Contact your Spare representative to learn more.

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The Spare Dashboard provides instant insights into revenue and performance metrics, Rider reviewers, vehicle status, and much more in a single view!

Configurable with multi-layout support to display over a dozen metrics, the Dashboard provides flexible at-a-glance insights. Auto-refresh and full screen functionality allow for Kiosk or TV viewing. Customize the Dashboard to show just the Live Map to inform Riders where Vehicles are, or enter fullscreen on a TV display to showcase the most recent Rider Reviews for your team.

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Sometimes you may want to require advance bookings on a service. With minimum advance booking window, this is now possible! This new feature makes it possible to require a certain window of time before a trip is available. In the rider application, the rider will be notified of the next possible booking time for the service.

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The Live Map now provides a clearer, more detailed view of your operations. Hover over any active vehicle to quickly access key details like vehicle status, number, driver, and fleet. Plus, see the vehicle’s current route to its next stop, enabling better monitoring and faster decision-making.

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Drivers can now easily collect and update trip information during pickups and drop-offs with editable Request Custom Fields displayed under Ride Details in Spare Driver. Admins can configure specific fields to appear and be editable by drivers, enabling seamless on-the-ground data collection for improved reporting, analytics, and rider experiences. From capturing trip notes to confirming non-digital payment methods, this feature empowers teams to gather valuable context directly from the field.

Fleet-Based Prioritization lets agencies control the order in which fleets are dispatched, ensuring that preferred fleets are utilized first while others are reserved for peak demand. This allows for more efficient fleet management and resource allocation during busy times.

Available exclusively in the Optimization package—contact your Spare representative to learn more.

Agencies managing "Accept Reject" fleets can now use the Allow Overbooking toggle to customize booking behavior. Choose whether to overbook a fleet beyond its capacity when additional vehicles aren’t available or restrict bookings to only available capacity. This feature provides greater flexibility to align booking strategies with operational needs.

Agencies now have the option to customize how pickup and drop-off times are displayed to riders. Choose between showing a time window (as currently displayed) or an average estimate for more simplified communication. Alongside this, visual enhancements in the Rider App improve clarity, including updated pickup labels on the map based on service configuration and separate pickup and drop-off times in the list view for easier reading.

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Dispatchers and admins can now personalize riders’ favorite locations by adding custom names directly in Spare Operations. A new text field labeled Name makes it simple to create and edit location names, enhancing clarity and making trip planning even more user-friendly for both riders and operations teams.

Riders can now receive reminders 24 hours before their scheduled pickup, helping them stay prepared and reducing the likelihood of missed trips. Easily set up this notification in Spare Operations to complement the existing 1-hour advance notification, ensuring riders are informed well ahead of their journey.

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As part of making Spare Rider accessible for riders of all abilities, we're improving support for screen readers. Riders with visual impairments or blindness often use screenreaders that read text out loud and describe what elements are present on the screen.We've added descriptions for icons, improved how estimates and services are described and navigated, and made it easier to navigate the ride booking flow overall.

Spare Engine now offers Global Optimization, an advanced tool that enhances the efficiency of scheduled trips. By automatically redistributing trips between vehicles in the background, the feature ensures an optimized overall trip schedule, reducing idle time and improving resource utilization.

When schedules are tight, finding space for a new passenger can be challenging. Spare Engine now leverages "Try Harder," a dynamic optimization process that reshuffles trips across vehicles to create space for new bookings—all while maintaining the commitments already made to other riders. While this may result in slightly longer search times for hard-to-fit requests, it significantly increases the chances of successfully matching trip requests, ensuring more passengers get where they need to go.

When services are busy, agencies now have the option to fit in that extra trip, even if it slightly impacts the trip flexibilities of other riders. With Override Flexibilities, authorized users can make informed decisions to accommodate additional trips by viewing who will be affected, on which services, and by how much. Agencies can also define maximum flexibility override limits for each service, ensuring a balance between efficiency and rider experience. Available exclusively in the Dispatch package—contact your Spare representative to learn more.

This feature is only available in our Dispatch package. Please contact your Spare representative to learn more.

Sometimes you want specific flexibility windows for recurring trips, in order to provide a promise to users in advance of their trip. Now you can! With recurring trip flexibilities, administrators can configure Spare to optimize for the requested time and only move it within the recurring trip flexibility window.

Operational delays happen, but staying informed is key to quick corrective action. With Late Duty Start notifications, agencies are alerted when a driver hasn’t begun their duty within 5 minutes of the scheduled start time. Notifications are sent every 5 minutes until the issue is resolved, ensuring dispatchers and operations teams can respond promptly to minimize service disruptions.

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Spare Rider Web makes trip planning and booking easier than ever, giving riders the power to plan, book, and manage journeys from any browser on any device. From seamless mixed-mode trip planning to real-time tracking and secure payments, this fully web-based platform delivers everything riders need in one place. By extending access beyond mobile apps, agencies can reach more riders and offer a streamlined experience that’s flexible, intuitive, and accessible anytime, anywhere.

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Spare Driver now lets drivers start trips early when riders are ready before their scheduled pickup time. Instead of waiting, drivers can proceed immediately, creating a smoother experience for riders and drivers alike. With Spare's advanced, real-time routing engine enabled, the system will dynamically re-optimize the driver’s trip manifest to account for the early pickup, ensuring the rest of the schedule remains efficient and timely.

Keeping riders informed just got easier with more detailed trip information now available in rider notifications. Agencies can provide additional details such as driver name, vehicle make and model, and precise pickup and drop-off timings, helping riders feel confident and prepared for their journey. These expanded notification options allow for a clearer, more personalized rider experience, ensuring customers stay informed at every step.

Full list of new variables:

• Earliest expected time to be picked up
• Latest expected time to be picked up
• Initially scheduled pickup time
• Currently scheduled pickup time
• Earliest expected time to be dropped off
• Latest expected time to be dropped off
• Initially scheduled drop-off time
• Driver’s first name
• Driver’s last name
• Make of vehicle
• Model of vehicle
• Vehicle color

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In the past, recurring trip editing only allowed for simple edits, like the days of the week, the end date and exceptions. Now with improved editing for recurring trips you are able to edit trip notes, accessibility features, and the number/types of passengers. Happy editing!

Spare now supports banning phone numbers, providing a more powerful tool for preventing unintended usage. Until the ban expires, no account associated with a banned number will be able to book rides.

Sometimes things change. A rider needs a new pickup time, the wrong service was selected, or maybe plans changed and a different rider is taking the trip! Until now, depending on the scope of the change, you may need to cancel a rider's trip request and create a new one.

With Edit Request, you will now be able to modify any parts of the original request that was booked, without the need to cancel it. This includes the rider, service, pickup time, custom fields, notes and more!

Happy editing! ✍️🚀

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Global optimization for live duties will take Global Optimization one step further by optimizing in real-time.

With Global Optimization, you just define how you want the system to run and then let the system do all the heavy lifting in real-time to continually optimize based on your business rules. This includes optimizing duties that are currently active with a manifest - in essence, rematching near-term trips. This helps keep riders happy in events when drivers may be running late to pickups earlier on in the trip manifest, or when there is new availability on a specific duty due to a cancellation.

Additionally, there are protections in place in order to prevent negative experiences for riders. For instance, Spare will not optimize a trip request if a driver is already heading for the pickup.

With Global Optimization now available for live duties, Spare will never stop making driver manifests better.

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A small step for Spare, a giant leap for efficiency. We're continuing to improve "GOLD" - our real-time optimization algorithm. This enhancement improves GOLD's efficiency, and scalability, and allows customers that share fleets with other organizations to benefit from our real-time optimization.

No one likes waiting, especially for the data you need to report on your services. That's why we've greatly increased the speed of our report downloads. Large reports now take seconds to download, instead of minutes ⏩ Give it a try!

Single and ready to mingle! Soon customers will be able to provide access to Spare Rider via any authentication method that uses the SAMLandOpenID Connectprotocols. That's one less thing for riders to remember!

What if your riders don't have a phone number? In the past you may have a hard time keeping them informed about the status of their trips. Now you can send Rider Notifications automatically to a rider using their email address. As we always say, "an informed customer is a happy customer". 🍻 to happy riders!

You booked a trip with a few legs, and the microtransit bus has just dropped you at the train station. Now what?  

With Spare’s multi-modal trip planner, it's easier than ever to continue on your way. Just tap "Continue Journey" and you'll see fresh options for getting to your ultimate destination by any mode of transit.

This feature is available in our Multi Modal Package. Contact your Spare representative to learn more.

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Spare's Platform is now easier to navigate for people who use assistive technology like screen readers. The most notable changes include:

• New super-visible headings on each page, so sighted and unsighted users alike can easily understand where they are
• New landmarks to help screenreader users skip to the part of the page they're looking for
• Improvements to how our interactive elements are labelled and described by screenreaders

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Setting up your service in Spare is already a piece of cake 🍰, but importing the data from your previous Transit Management System can be a drag. We're making it possible to get up & running in record time. With Spare's migration toolset, customers can import riders, drivers, vehicles, trips & driver schedules in just a few clicks!

Fleet Agreements let agencies integrate fleet vendors like Lyft and local taxi cabs into their services, ensuring that the fleet provider’s terms of service and the FTA’s drug and alcohol regulations are satisfied. This enables Spare customers to integrate additional fleets into their services that improve quality and reduce cost.

Are your booking agents wasting hours trying to differentiate between Jane Doe and Jane Doe? Sometimes searching by the rider's name isn't enough. That's why we're improving Spare's search functionality to also search across Custom Fields. Soon you'll be able to search using the custom fields you've added to the rider's profile, like their date of birth or a unique identification number, ensuring booking agents can book trips in record time!

Long wait times create poor rider experience – especially when riders’ transit options are limited. But it doesn’t have to be that way – by using third-party transportation providers, you can add additional options to your demand-responsive transit services. That keeps wait times low and customers satisfied, and that’s why Spare officially partnered with MTI.  

By integrating MTI and Spare, you can dispatch vehicles the same way you do with your dedicated fleet. If all your existing vehicles are booked, riders will have access to MTI's large network of drivers and riders through a system that is still run, monitored, and tracked through your Spare portal.

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Which John Doe is which? It’s pretty hard to tell without more information, so we added it! More information helps you effortlessly distinguish between riders with similar names, ensuring seamless communication and service delivery. With this update, phone numbers and email addresses are now displayed alongside the rider's name directly in the search bar, allowing for quick and accurate identification.

This feature not only simplifies the process of locating and communicating with individual riders, but also minimizes the risk of errors in scheduling and dispatching. By providing a more comprehensive view of rider information at a glance, transit agencies can experience improved efficiency and accuracy in their daily operations.

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Your organization's processes are unique to you. Now, you can add another tool to your toolbox – riders or other users can upload multiple files to the Spare platform. For example, you can collect eligibility files for your paratransit service all in one place in Spare Engage, reducing the burden on riders and your organization!

Spare’s service configurations allow for you to show certain services to the Rider App and keep some for your reservationists to use at their discretion. So when a reservationist is editing a trip that was originally booked through your Rider App, they should still have access to those discretionary services. With our latest update, you can now rematch trip requests to any available service, broadening the range of options for efficient scheduling and resource allocation.  

This improved functionality empowers mobility service providers to optimize their operations by better aligning trip requests with the most suitable services. By offering greater adaptability in real-time trip management, you can enhance service quality, reduce wait times for riders, and improve overall operational efficiency.

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Get your riders the help they need by showing a support link on past trips. Support Links are fleet-specific, so you can add a different link to each of your fleets - for example, linking trips on your dedicated fleets to your own lost and found page and trips on non-dedicated fleets to their operators' support page. May your riders find everything they're looking for!

One of your drivers had to take a break and so you quickly paused their vehicle using Spare. Phew, no new trips were given to that driver while it was paused! But now, how do you know how long their vehicle was paused for? We’ve added “Vehicle Pause Duration” to Analyze Reports, so you can easily find this information and more!

Yes, you heard right. Spare now includes Driver Breaks. 🙌

Now you can set up a policy for how breaks should be facilitated on your fleets. This policy will then automatically schedule breaks into your duties. Drivers are notified when their break starts in the driver app, and dispatchers can easily view in-progress and upcoming breaks on the live map.

Driver Breaks helps you reduce the operational overhead required to facilitate breaks and ensures that you satisfy organizational requirements around driver shift scheduling.

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It’s another busy day and a rider calls in wondering where their driver is. You’re frantically looking at the Live Map trying to find their vehicle amongst the sea of moving cars, if only you could search the driver's name!

Now we’ve made that possible, further enhancing your ability to efficiently monitor your fleet. You can now search for vehicles on the Live Map using driver names or vehicle IDs, allowing for quick and precise tracking of your service vehicles.

This additional functionality empowers dispatchers to effortlessly identify on-time, late, or idling vehicles, ensuring optimal efficiency and improved decision-making for your transit operations. Experience a new level of fleet management with our latest Live Map update!

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