Digital Transformation of Volunteer-Driver Transit

New Brunswick’s mix of urban hubs and expansive rural communities makes transportation access critical, especially for seniors, low-income families, newcomers, and residents without a personal vehicle. Urban/Rural Rides (URR) is a registered charity that coordinates volunteer driver services that provide accessible, on-demand transportation to residents across different regions in the province. Rides are often over long distances and pass through both rural and urban geographies, creating routing and efficiency challenges. Over the past 10 years, URR has seen a surge in demand for its services as the population in New Brunswick grows (largely from immigration) and ages (almost a quarter of the population is over 65). With a limited number of volunteers able to drive riders where they need to go, URR turned to Blaise software to help streamline its operations.

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Challenges

• No centralized platform across regions. Coordination of resources is required across the 12 regions where URR operates, each with its own rules, pricing models, and invoicing practices. Without a shared system, managing operations province-wide was disjointed, and reporting to funders and overseeing service quality suffered from inconsistent data and no shared infrastructure.

• Unpredictable, manual coordination. URR used Excel spreadsheets to organize the thousands of rides it provided each year. Its service runs on volunteer drivers whose availability is highly variable: drivers choose the trips they want and can cancel at the last minute. Dispatchers assigned trips manually through those sprawling spreadsheets, tracking who’d been contacted, who’d declined, and who might still be available, which made daily coordination slow and error-prone.

• High-volume, manual invoicing. Each region calculated trip costs differently, factoring in deadhead mileage, ad hoc trips, and tiered client rates. Staff prepared up to 100 invoices a month by hand for government funders like Social Development, creating a heavy administrative burden and raising the risk of billing errors and delays.

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Change Management: Crawl, Walk, Run

URR's transformation was as much about people as it was about technology. URR launched with a version of Blaise that met most of its needs, including modifications made ahead of go-live. Rather than trying to anticipate every challenge in advance, URR chose to go live, learn from real-world use, and shape the platform together with Blaise based on what it saw in practice. Over time, feedback from day-to-day operations turned into new features and refinements, all developed in close partnership.

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Central to this success was URR's leadership, which made change management a priority from the start. They understood that the project would only succeed if ride coordinators, drivers, and volunteers were genuinely on board. Staff and volunteers were included in feedback sessions, heard in a meaningful way, and shown what's in it for them and how the technology could benefit their work. This was never a top-down mandate. "Collaborating with Blaise over the past few years has allowed us to significantly cut down on the manual admin work we were previously doing and we've set ourselves up to continue scaling up our services for the future” says URR Executive Director Kelly Taylor.

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That trust is reinforced through regular monthly meetings between Blaise and URR's Ride Coordinators, who have direct input into every new feature they have requested and every improvement Blaise makes to the platform. It's the kind of co-design partnership Blaise values most, because real use shapes a platform far better than perfecting it in advance.  

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The Blaise Transit Solution

• Centralized, yet locally customizable. Blaise’s platform gives URR province-wide data oversight and reporting while letting each region keep operating under its own local rules. That shared infrastructure lets URR scale gradually, layering in the Blaise Routing Algorithm, deeper analytics, or Blaise’s driver and passenger apps without disrupting how any individual region runs today.

• Features built for volunteer-driver operations. Giving Ride Coordinators the ability to manually intervene and make exceptions when necessary was essential to moving URR to an automated, algorithm-driven platform. Blaise built new features in consultation with URR, such as a manual adjustments tool that lets coordinators override algorithm decisions. Blaise’s multi-stop trips feature allows Ride Coordinators to schedule multiple trips on the same vehicle for one passenger, and its scheduling platform lets specific vehicles be reserved for certain passengers, giving coordinators more flexibility to assign volunteer drivers to nearby passengers.

• Customized scheduling tools. Most on-demand platforms assume a fixed set of paid drivers on a set schedule, but URR’s model doesn’t work that way. As a result of URR’s reality (among other volunteer-based systems) Blaise is about to release a “draft trips” feature designed specifically around how Ride Coordinators actually schedule rides: trips can be entered into the Blaise Engine dispatch tool without an assigned driver, an exact time, or a confirmed origin/destination, then refined as driver availability firms up. It’s a level of flexibility traditional on-demand transit platforms don’t offer, built around the reality of coordinating a variable volunteer workforce rather than a fixed-roster model.

• Automated, configurable invoicing. URR’s most immediate need was to simplify and standardize invoicing across all regions. Blaise automated invoice generation from real-time ride data, supporting the full range of regional billing models (mileage tracking, deadhead fees, ad hoc charges, and tiered pricing by rider profile). The feature is now in use across participating regions and is already cutting the administrative load of preparing high volumes of monthly funder invoices.

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Built for Volunteer-Driver Transit

Variable driver availability, last-minute cancellations, and trips assigned by choice rather than schedule are the norm for volunteer-driver agencies, and traditional on-demand transit software isn’t built for that reality. Blaise is built for it, from configurable invoicing that adapts to each region’s rules, to a dispatch workflow designed around how Ride Coordinators actually work, to province-wide oversight that still leaves every region running its own way.

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