Sault Ste. Marie On Demand

Be nice if this was merged into UMO. Like you have app for weekends, app for pass, web app for tracking. Simply it.

It's a beautiful app thanks Sault Ste Marie

Great almost unlimited choices. Only some small misunderstandings of drop off. This is sooooo convenient. THANKS

TL;DR: Buy a car, get a cab, or walk. So for a bit of background information, my usual bus ride from the terminal takes about 15 minutes on Sault College, bringing me up to the corner of Northern and Pine. Tonight was my first time using the service, and it seriously left something to be desired. At 7:15, when the service started, there were 5 buses at the terminal ready to go, and a few passengers and me were put on one of them. With 5 different buses, I thought that we were all sorted based on general area of destination, and the app showed a 30-minute bus ride, which was already a bit longer than I was expecting. Somehow, the system decided that the best route for our passengers was to go all the way to the west end, all the way to the east end, then finally all the way up to my stop, by Sault College. The timing of the route went as follows: 45 minutes doing laps in the west end, followed by a detour lap around the terminal, followed by a 20-minute trip out and around the east end, and finally a 10-minute route to "my stop". My stop turned out to be about 4 "bus stop" signs away from my normal sign, and I walked the rest of the way. The bus then drove all the way up past my usual stop and kept going. So when all was said and done, what would normally have been a 15-minute bus ride and a 5-minute walk turned into an hour and 15 minute lap of the city and a 20-minute walk. Sault On Demand is a service that is designed to save the city money, and in doing so is driving more and more people away from the transit system and towards taking a cab. The app does what it says it does, but the service behind the app needs a lot of work and maybe even an hour of testing before it should even consider going public.