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“At first, we weren’t really sure how this was going to turn out in the 11-month stage one part of the project,” said Tim Cane, Innisfil’s manager of land use planning, in an interview with the Financial Post.

“But we’ve been pleasantly surprised with how it’s gone. It hasn’t been a perfect system, but we recognized that to begin with — that it was going to be an evolving system — and that’s what has happened.”

As part of the evolution of the service, Cane said the city has decided to add two additional routes — the library in Alcona and the South Innisfil Community Centre in Lefroy — in part due to demand.

According to new data released by Innisfil and Uber, more than 3,400 people have completed 26,700 trips on the subsidized service since it launched in May.

In the month of January alone, Paul Pentikainen, a senior policy adviser with the town, said nearly 6,000 people used the subsidized Uber service — a sharp jump from the nearly 5,000 trips that were taken in the pilot project’s first two months of operations.

The town had initially budgeted $100,00 for the first six to nine months of the project, and an additional $125,000 for 2018. However, demand forced the town to dip into the 2018 funding sooner than anticipated.

Still, Pentikainen said the system is proving to be cost efficient when compared to a traditional bus route.

“When you compare the average subsidy-per-passenger to that of a traditional bus system, it just shows the cost efficiencies of this system,” Pentikainen said.