Edmonton Transit's Royale app tier now free to riders for four years
ETS's premium Royale service goes to every rider at no cost, funded from existing budget, with a $540,000 annual subscription behind it.
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Riders in Edmonton pay nothing to use ETS's premium Royale app features, after the executive committee approved a four-year subscription on Oct. 2. The subscription costs $540,000 a year and sits inside ETS's existing budget, which carries a $2.5 million operating surplus. No additional tax dollars come from the upcoming four-year budget.
To get access, riders download the app and open it with location tracking enabled while in Edmonton. It shows real-time bus and train locations, departure reminders and service disruption alerts, and includes a "Rate my Ride" feature where riders rate lighting, cleanliness and service quality. Users can also report outages.
Carrie Hotton-MacDonald, ETS branch manager, said at a press conference at Corona Station on Thursday that the district will get feedback from "hundreds of thousands of individual trips completed each month from each of our riders." She said riders had asked for the feature. Reviews submitted run over 336,000 a month, and the app has more than 100,000 downloads in the region, according to ETS. ETS picked an established app rather than building its own. Suburban systems including St. Albert, Strathcona County, Spruce Grove, Fort Saskatchewan, Leduc and Beaumont Transit are also on it. Data collected is anonymous and individual information is not gathered.
Mayor Andrew Knack, who sits on the executive committee, said: "The users will get their money's worth because they'll get a much better experience. The city will get our money's worth because the data that you get allows us to better improve the system in a much more expedited way."
The committee vote is not described as final.
