DANVILLE — Commuters in a small East Bay suburb will soon have more of an incentive to take public transit: In a first-of-its kind partnership in the Bay Area, a bus agency is offering on-demand rides that passengers can hail with a smartphone or tablet.

If that service sounds a lot like the popular ride-hailing giants, Uber and Lyft, it’s because that’s precisely the model they’re emulating. It’s all an effort to provide better customer service, more access to transit and, hopefully, reduce the cost of operating large buses in hard-to-reach places like Danville’s Alamo Creek, said Rick Ramacier, the general manager of the Central Contra Costa Transit Authority, better known as County Connection.

“The question was really, ‘Can public transit provide a public service that is mirroring what people are seeing in the private sector that will work like public transit?'” Ramacier said. “Public transit should be cheaper than Uber or Lyft or a taxi service.”

In Alamo Creek, residents already pay a special assessment for a traditional dial-a-ride bus service, but Ramacier said they only get about 25 calls per day. The sprawling, upscale suburb is difficult to serve, he said, because it’s too costly to run a standard, 40-foot bus that doesn’t often get filled with passengers. So, he said it was a natural fit to offer the on-demand option for commuters heading to BART and others that might otherwise hail an Uber or Lyft to get around.

But will the public hop on board this new service? The agency plans in February to launch a six-month pilot program with TransLoc, a North Carolina-based company, to find out, Ramacier said. After the pilot, they’ll assess whether to expand the service or scrap it altogether.

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BART’s Oakland Airport Connector losing money; Uber, Lyft to blame? And, they’re not alone. TransLoc on Thursday announced it’s also partnering with the San Joaquin Regional Transit District and the Orange County Transportation Authority to offer similar services tailored to each community. In the Central Valley, for example, the transit agency began in July offering discounts on Uber if the ride originates or ends outside its service district, similar to the “Go Dublin!” program, which offers discounts to Wheels Bus riders for trips within the city of Dublin.

The San Joaquin RTD uses TransLoc for trips that require wheelchair-accessible vehicles, said Terry Williams a spokesman for the agency. Rather than looking at ride-hailing services such as Lyft as competition, Williams said the San Joaquin RTD took a different tact: They decided to partner with them instead.

“It’s our way of being able to extend service on an affordable basis to places we couldn’t before,” Williams said.

The ability to customize the service based on each area’s need is the key to not only providing a better customer service, but also to strengthening the role of public transit in an industry that has seen a lot of disruption of late, said Rahul Kumar, TransLoc’s vice president. Rather than taking a “one-service-fits-all” model, Kumar said the company takes a deep dive into each bus agency’s data to better understand what riders want and then helps them craft “microtransit” solutions to fill in the gaps.

“Microtransit isn’t just one thing,” Kumar said. “It’s a concept that allows an agency to solve their most pressing problem.”

So far, Kumar said the company is operating in two transit districts, with plans to have 25 pilot programs in operation by mid-2018. And, it’s not just small transit districts requesting specialized services to help them access suburban and rural areas, he said. Even the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, one of the largest transit agencies in the country, is in the midst of soliciting bids for a similar on-demand service, along with another 140 transit agencies across the country.