Transit officials worldwide worry that ride-hail apps like Uber and Lyft are creating traffic and pulling passengers away from public transit. Amid that concern, Florida’s Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority in 2016 tried something unusual: It began to subsidize rides on Uber, taxis, or wheelchair-accessible cars that ended at a public transit stop. In a sense, the experiment made Uber into public transit.

Aarian Marshall covers autonomous vehicles, transportation policy, and urban planning for WIRED.

In many ways, the project feels like the future, an innovative embrace of Silicon Valley. The county nixed two poorly performing bus routes and used that money to give riders $3 breaks, and later $5 breaks, on Uber or taxi rides to specified public transit stops. By swiping to a special screen inside the app, Uber riders can travel to within 800 feet of 24 eligible bus stops and then transfer to a bus for free.

“In our county, we really are trying to change the culture so that more people are using public transit rather than thinking about putting their car on the road,” says Janet Long, a Pinellas County commissioner and chair of the transit authority board. She and her fellow commissioners voted in May to extend the program, called Direct Connect, through 2021, for up to $300,000 a year.

Pinellas County, which includes cities like St. Petersburg and Clearwater, “was a surprising first” for this kind of experiment, says Sharon Feigon, executive director of the nonprofit organization Shared Use Mobility Center. “It’s a smaller agency, a conservative community in a lot of ways, and they were taking all these risks.”

Since 2016, the idea has been widely copied, with varying success. A program in exurban Toronto that went all in on subsidized Ubers in place of fixed-route buses was a victim of its own popularity, and was forced to raise prices and limit individuals’ use to hold down costs. Kansas City, Missouri, ended its app-based shared-van service after netting just four rides a day. Centennial, Colorado, nixed a partnership with Lyft after spending more money and serving fewer riders than its traditional call-a-ride service. Boston, meanwhile, just re-upped a three-year-old partnership with Uber and Lyft to supplement its call-a-ride service for residents with disabilities, despite some complaints from wheelchair-using riders that the program had left them stranded.

In a new report, the Shared Use Mobility Center gives the Pinellas County program mixed reviews. (The center, which receives funding from Uber, worked with Uber and the transit authority on the report.) On one hand, public officials have worked diligently to improve the service, changing where it operates and boosting marketing when ridership foundered. They also showed creativity in partnering with private companies and adapting the strict guidelines and paperwork that typically come with public funding. (Transit authority lawyers decided, for example, to defer to Uber’s drug- and alcohol-testing process even though it did not meet federal standards, reasoning it provided taxis as an alternative. They also had to ensure that people without smartphones could access the service.) The transit authority “was willing to take risks and keep iterating. I think that was really commendable,” Feigon says.

But viewed through a different lens, the Florida program raises questions about whether this kind of “first-mile, last-mile” collaboration between the public and private sectors is worth the time and money, and whether the tech can attract more people onto struggling transit services.

For one, not that many people are riding. In its first six months, Direct Connect supported fewer than two trips per day. After two years of experimentation, reworking, and national publicity, the numbers did climb, but only to 30 trips per day. By contrast, each stop on the two canceled bus routes served fewer than three riders a day. Average daily ridership for all of the transit authority’s routes is 32,419.