How Ryde Cut Transportation Costs and Optimized Employee Commuting for the Tech Industry
- 25%
- Shuttle cost reduction
- 58% to 76%
- Occupancy lift
- 84% to 93%
- On-time rate improvement
Challenge
A 1,200-employee hi-tech company headquartered in central Israel, with two campuses and a mixed on-site/hybrid workforce, was spending over NIS 8 million per year on employee transportation. The company ran 14 shuttle lines through a single fleet vendor, but route planning had not been revisited in three years. Occupancy data was unavailable; the transportation manager relied on driver headcounts reported by phone each morning. Three problems compounded the cost: first, six of the 14 lines ran below 55% occupancy on most days, meaning the company paid for empty seats on nearly half its routes. Second, the hybrid-work policy introduced in 2022 created unpredictable daily demand. Monday and Thursday ridership was 40% higher than Tuesday and Wednesday, but every route ran the same vehicle size five days a week. Third, the two campuses sat 12 km apart, and employees transferring between sites mid-day used personal cars or taxis expensed to the company, adding roughly NIS 320,000 per year in untracked costs. The trigger for change was a Q3 budget review. The CFO flagged transportation as the third-largest facilities line item after rent and utilities, and asked the operations team to cut the line by at least 15% without reducing service levels. The transportation manager evaluated three vendors over six weeks before selecting RYDE.
Solution
RYDE deployed its Smart Employee Commuting platform across both campuses in a phased rollout that lasted 26 days from contract signature to full operation. Week 1 focused on data collection. RYDE's onboarding team installed passenger-counting sensors on all 14 shuttle lines and connected the platform to the company's HRIS (BambooHR) to pull employee home-address clusters, shift schedules, and hybrid-attendance patterns. The transportation manager's team provided the existing route map and fleet-vendor contract terms. Weeks 2-3 covered route redesign. Using four weeks of occupancy and attendance data, RYDE's routing engine consolidated the 14 lines into 11, merging three low-occupancy suburban routes into two higher-density corridors. Two lines were converted from fixed 50-seat buses to dynamic 20-seat shuttles that only dispatched when at least 12 riders confirmed via the passenger app by 7:00 PM the night before. The inter-campus mid-day transfer was replaced with a dedicated 16-seat shuttle running four fixed loops per day, eliminating the taxi-expense problem entirely. Week 4 was the pilot. RYDE ran the new route map alongside the legacy routes for five business days. Riders who opted into the new routes received real-time ETA notifications through the RYDE passenger app. The transportation manager monitored both systems from a single dashboard, comparing on-time rates, occupancy, and rider feedback scores. By day 3, 78% of eligible employees had switched to the optimized routes voluntarily. The fleet vendor relationship stayed intact. RYDE's platform sent daily dispatch instructions to the existing vendor's operations center via API, specifying vehicle type, pickup sequence, and estimated passenger count per stop. The vendor appreciated the structured data; it reduced their own dead-mileage by 11%. On the customer side, the transportation manager and one operations coordinator owned the day-to-day system. RYDE provided a dedicated account manager for the first 90 days, then transitioned to standard support with a 4-hour SLA for critical issues.
Result
Within the first quarter of full operation, the company recorded a 25% reduction in total shuttle spend, from NIS 8M annualized to NIS 6M. The savings came from three sources: route consolidation eliminated three vehicle contracts (NIS 1.1M), dynamic right-sizing on two lines cut per-ride cost by 18%, and the inter-campus shuttle replaced NIS 320K in annual taxi expenses. Occupancy across the remaining 11 routes rose from an average of 58% to 76%. The two dynamic lines averaged 81% occupancy, partly because the confirmation-based dispatch meant vehicles only ran when demand justified them. On-time performance improved from 84% to 93%. The primary driver was tighter stop sequencing: RYDE's routing engine reduced average route length by 14%, which cut exposure to traffic variability. Employee satisfaction scores on the quarterly engagement survey's commute question rose 9 points (from 62 to 71 on a 100-point scale). The transportation manager attributed most of the lift to the real-time ETA feature: employees stopped arriving at stops 15 minutes early as a buffer. One friction point: the transition week saw a 6% complaint rate from riders on the three consolidated suburban routes, who now had longer walks to new pickup points. The team addressed this by adding one micro-stop in a residential cluster after reviewing the complaint data, which brought the rate below 1% by week 6. "We expected cost savings. We did not expect the operations team to get three hours of their day back. The automated dispatch instructions alone justified the platform fee." -- Operations Director Next steps: the company is expanding RYDE to a third campus opening in Q2 2026.