Municipality of North Grenville, ON

How North Grenville is making rural transit visible, trusted, and fundable

When the Municipality of North Grenville, Ontario launched NGtransit in January 2024, leaders knew the service would need to prove itself quickly.

North Grenville is a fast-growing rural municipality of about 18,000 people located south of Ottawa. Residents are spread across 352 square kilometres, and before NGtransit there were no private taxi or ride-share options available in the community. For many residents, access to work, appointments, groceries, social services, volunteer opportunities and regional connections depended on a personal vehicle or help from someone else.

~18,000 Residents

352 sq km

January 2024 NGTransit Launched

North Grenville council members chose an on-demand transit model because a traditional fixed-route system would not serve the whole municipality. Approximately two-thirds of the population lives outside the urban core, and the goal was to create a service available to residents of all ages and abilities, whether they lived in town or in a rural area.

But launching the service was only part of the challenge. North Grenville also needed a way to show residents, elected officials, and funding partners how the system was being used, what it cost, and how it was improving over time.

Envisio gave North Grenville the structure to do that.

“Before Envisio, we didn’t have a good method for internal reporting. Now I’m constantly going to my own dashboards to refresh my reporting.”

Less manual reporting, more real-time visibility

While North Grenville provided accessible transportation before NGtransit launched, the earlier process was highly manual. Every ride was recorded in Excel, municipal staff had to work through the data to understand and display performance, and historical information was difficult to analyze, compare, and communicate.

With NGtransit, the municipality built reporting into the service from the beginning. Using Envisio, North Grenville maintains both a public-facing dashboard and an internal council dashboard. The public dashboard helps residents see how the service is performing, while the internal dashboard gives staff and council members deeper operational data to support decisions.

What NGtransit’s dashboard covers

The public dashboard tracks performance across several categories, including:

• trips taken
• financials
• rider behavior
• service performance
• user experience
• system updates

Residents can see information such as ridership, rejection rates, average daily rides, urban-versus-rural demand, fare recovery, cost effectiveness, booking methods, on-time performance, and passenger ratings.

The math behind a rural transit ride

The dashboard also gives the municipality a way to explain rural transit economics. NGtransit’s fare recovery is about nine percent, and the cost per ride is approximately $45. Without context, those numbers could invite criticism. With transparent reporting, they become part of a fuller story about who benefits, how the service is used, and how the municipality manages public investment.

That shift from raw numbers to shared context has changed how North Grenville explains and improves the service. Instead of reacting to one-off questions or manually assembling information, staff can rely on core data points that are updated consistently and easy to share.

“We’re doing less frantic tracking of a million things. We’re really trying to focus on the key data pieces.”

Building trust with council, residents, and funders

For North Grenville, transparency is both a communications goal and a strategy for sustaining the service.

Council wanted confidence that the municipality’s investment was delivering public value. Residents needed to see that the service was being used and was reliable. Funding partners needed evidence that the municipality could track performance and adapt as demand changed.

How one dashboard serves three very different audiences

The dashboard helps serve all three audiences:

Council

The internal dashboard provides answers to detailed performance questions, including rejection rates, boardings per hour, cost-per-ride visibility and the performance of new service components. When council members asked whether commuter service data could be tracked separately, the dashboard made it possible to create a dedicated section for that purpose.

Residents

The public dashboard makes the service visible. It shows that NGtransit is not an underused experiment but a growing transportation system carrying thousands of riders and adapting to community needs. The public dashboard receives hundreds of visits per month, and the transit program page is the most-visited page on the municipal website.

Funders

Having a publicly-available dashboard provides a clearer picture of how on-demand rural transit operates. North Grenville received $719,000 through Ontario’s Transit Investment Fund to support the Ottawa commuter connection and expand the existing on-demand service.

“In terms of building public trust, Envisio really helps us do that by making everything super accessible for our residents, businesses, and anyone looking to learn more about the community. For residents especially, it has made it a lot easier to understand what exactly goes on within these municipal walls.”

Provincial recognition

In May 2026, North Grenville was invited by the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario to present as an Ontario Transit Investment Fund recipient during a session for transit systems across the province. This invitation gave the municipality yet another opportunity to show how data, consistent reporting, and transparency support rural mobility.

A service that keeps evolving

NGtransit has grown quickly. The service has now completed more than 30,000 rides since launch, maintained a 4.7 out of 5 passenger rating and earned national recognition through the Transportation Association of Canada’s Small Municipalities Achievement Award.

30,000 Rides

4.7/5 Passenger Rating

1 National TAC Award

It operates seven days a week and allows riders to book by phone, online, or through the Blaise app. Fares are $5 for adults and $3 for youth ages 12 to 19, with children 11 and under riding free. The service uses small, accessible vehicles and real-time ride optimization technology to serve both rural and urban residents.

What riders asked for, and what changed

As ridership patterns and rider feedback have emerged, North Grenville has adjusted. The municipality extended service hours until 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday based on demand. The team also adjusted boarding times to better serve riders with mobility needs, and bundled tickets to improve affordability. To connect the service to residents who may face greater transportation barriers, NGtransit partners with Ontario Works and local youth and disability support organizations.

Expanding service capacity

In September 2025, NGtransit expanded to include a commuter service connecting North Grenville to Ottawa’s Light Rail Transit system at Limebank Station. In its first six months, the commuter service recorded 1,233 riders. An additional vehicle also increased local service capacity during the day.

Rider stories show what’s at stake

While the NGtransit dashboard shows how the commuter service has changed, riders provide the best indication of what it means to daily life.

Karen Humphries has used the on-demand service since the beginning and now rides three to four times a week for errands, pharmacy trips, and volunteering at a local hospice. After a traumatic driving experience, she chooses not to drive, which can be isolating in a rural community.

“I think it’s wonderful that the service exists. I can get to my volunteer job, and I can contribute to my community more.”

Scott Elmore began using NGtransit after the commuter connection to Ottawa launched in September. He rides four to five days a week from Kemptville to Ottawa for work, replacing a drive that cost about $110 a week in gas plus maintenance, with a $70 monthly transit pass.

“I think they’re doing a fantastic job overall,” he says. “They’ve really brought a service that this community’s really needed.”

A model for other communities

As NGtransit has matured, other municipalities have taken notice.

North Grenville continues to receive calls and messages from communities interested in rural transit, on-demand service design and performance reporting. When Hillary speaks with other municipalities, the dashboard is often the first place she directs them.

“It’s all there,” she says.

That visibility makes North Grenville’s story easier to share. It also reinforces one of the municipality’s core lessons: rural transit requires more than vehicles and software. It requires council support, internal ownership, clear reporting processes, frequent communication and a willingness to use data to improve.

Success spreads to other North Grenville departments

The success of the transit dashboard is also influencing other departments in North Grenville. After seeing how NGtransit uses Envisio to communicate progress, staff working on the municipality’s climate action plan looked at the transit dashboard as a model.

That broader interest reflects the value of a shared reporting approach. Whether the topic is transit, climate action or another municipal priority, departments need a way to turn complex work into a clear story for residents and decision-makers.

“Our community has so many moving parts and so many different departments working on so many different projects, Envisio really helps us bring it all together.”

Small communities can still show big results

NGtransit challenges the assumption that small communities cannot deliver meaningful public transit.

The service works because North Grenville designed a model to fit its reality: a large rural geography, growing demand, limited transportation alternatives, and a council commitment to serving the whole community.

Why transparency does the heavy lifting

With public dashboards, internal reporting and consistent performance data, North Grenville shows the work: how the service is being used, where it is improving, and why it matters. That visibility supports council confidence, strengthens funding conversations and helps residents understand the value of a service that may not look like traditional urban transit.

“When I talk to other communities, a lot of the conversation comes back to getting as much data as you can and using it to show the council and the public what is really happening,” Hillary says. “These decisions aren’t pulled out of a hat. They’re based on ridership, demand, and what the data is telling us.”

“Using Envisio to support this work has made us a lot more accountable and transparent. Those aren’t just buzzwords — they are in our values. We’re really using the platform to ensure the public knows what we’re working on and how progress is going on different projects.”