“Not only will it cover the area we’re already serving, Via will get people to places Max was too limited to get close to,” said Alicia Winkelblech, the assistant director of strategic planning for the city of Arlington.

Via’s coverage area will start in downtown and expand in phases to cover large swaths of Arlington, including entertainment districts, health-care centers, and the commuter rail station near the airport. City officials say service hours will shift based on passenger demand over the course of the pilot program, which will be up for renewal after one year.

No ridership goals have been established yet, since Arlington’s circumstances are without compare: No other city has tested microtransit-only service. The main criteria for judging success will be whether Via reduces single-occupancy vehicle trips, which the city plans to measure based on data collected and shared by Via. Winkelblech is particularly optimistic that it can carve into the market for private or even pooled Uber and Lyft trips. “A trip that might cost $12 on a ride-hailing service will now cost $3,” she said. “We anticipate quite a lot of interest in this.”

Via, which launched in 2013, operates its own vehicles in New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., providing 1.5 million rides per month, according to its website. The company has licensed software to other public agencies in search of alternatives to poor-performing bus routes: Austin, Texas; Orange County, California; and the city of Kent in the U.K. all have Via technology working beneath their custom apps, apparently with relative success. Austin’s pilot, called “Pickup,” reached six-month ridership goals within the first two months.

Not all microtransit services have seen such positive returns. Private luxury shuttles like Loup and Leap failed to strike a viable balance between price point and passenger volumes. Bridj, the now-shuttered microtransit start-up that partnered with Kansas City’s transit authority to much fanfare in 2015, provided just 600 rides in a 6-month pilot, a failure observers chalked up to questionable routing and poor marketing. Recently, Chariot, the Ford-backed private shuttle service running in San Francisco, was shut down temporarily for having the wrong permits.

Zachary Wasserman, Via’s head of global business development, said that the company is taking care to avoid the marketing and regulatory slipups its predecessors and competitors have fallen into. He also noted a fundamental difference: Whereas other variants have followed more or less fixed routes, “Via is fully dynamic and on-demand,” he said. “You can literally go from anywhere to anywhere, within the zone the city wants us to cover.” And in the case of Arlington, Via will be subsidized by public tax dollars, including one of the first federal grants to fund microtransit in the country. Without such subsidies, many have argued that microtransit cannot succeed at all.