# Park & Ride [Read this page on Reroute](https://rerouteapp.ca/features/hybrid) Features Drive to the station, park, ride the rest. Reroute builds that trip and ranks it honestly. ## What it does Park & Ride is a trip Reroute builds, not a box you tick. It drives you to a station, parks the car, and rides the rest of the way, then prices the whole thing end to end: the gas, the lot, the fare, and the toll if the fast way takes one. It runs in both directions. Drive out to a station and ride in is the classic commute. Ride in first and pick the car up at the far end is the reverse, and Reroute builds both unless you pin one yourself. Whatever it builds is ranked next to the pure driving and pure transit versions of the same trip on real door to door time. That is the only reason building it is worth anything: when driving the whole way genuinely wins, the list has to be willing to say so. ## How it works You plan a trip the way you always do, a start and an end. Reroute looks at the rapid transit and commuter rail stations sitting between the two and works out which of them are worth driving to. The winner is not simply the nearest station. A station only helps if it is on the way, so each candidate is weighed on how short the drive would be, whether it points at your destination or away from it, whether it has a lot and what that lot costs, and whether the line running through it is having a bad day right now. The few that survive are then built as complete trips: a drive to the lot entrance rather than to the middle of the platform, a walk across the lot when the entrance and the platform are far enough apart to matter, and the ride from there. Each one is timed end to end, and the option Reroute recommends is chosen on that clock, not on the score that got it built. ![Reroute showing two park and ride options for one trip, each with its driving leg, its transit leg, the station's parking and a total travel time, ranked against each other.](https://rerouteapp.ca/landing/shots/hybrid-park-ride-ranked.webp) Two park and ride options for the same trip, ranked: via Keele at 1 hr 55 beats via Mimico GO at 2 hr. The banner above them is Reroute pointing out that going the whole way by transit would still be 37 minutes faster, which is the answer a feature like this is only worth having if it is willing to give. ## How a station earns its place Scoring does not pick your trip. It picks which stations are worth the expensive part, which is building and timing a whole trip through each one. Here is what it weighs, heaviest first, and what rules a station out before any of it is counted. 1. **How short the drive is** The heaviest single factor. A station you reach quickly is worth more than one that is merely closer than the alternative, and the value tapers off smoothly the further out it sits. 2. **Whether it is on the way** Measured against the straight line to your destination. A station that turns the trip into a detour gives back most of what its proximity earned. 3. **Whether it has a lot** A station with parking beats one without, and the lot's real rate is priced into the finished trip rather than only nudging the score. 4. **What runs there, and when** A subway station runs all day, every day. A commuter rail station on a Sunday evening may not run at all, and is marked down for the hour you are actually travelling. 5. **Whether the line is in trouble** A station on a line with an active closure is marked down hard, before anything is built through it. 6. **How long the wait would be** Something leaving in the next ten minutes counts for more than a forty-five minute gap on the platform. And three things rule a station out before any of that is counted. - The drive would be under half a kilometre. That is not a park and ride, it is a walk. - The station sits more than ninety degrees off your direction of travel. No amount of parking makes that a shortcut. - Going via it means driving away from where you are going, far enough that no transit leg could win the time back. ## Make it yours Every setting below is named exactly as the app names it, with where to find it. None of it needs an account. **Park & ride radius** (Settings) How far you will drive to a station, from 1 km to 25 km, 15 km to start. It is a preference, not a fence: a station past it is not banned, it just has to win on directness and parking instead. **Include parking cost** (Settings → Trip preferences → Driving preferences) Off to start. Turn it on and estimated parking is folded into what a drive costs, the station lot on a Park & Ride included. It is off by default because a parking guess in a card's headline total talks riders out of routes before they open them. **407 transponder** (Settings → Trip preferences → Driving preferences) Tell Reroute you have one and the camera charge comes off every 407 stretch it prices, on the drive leg of a Park & Ride as much as on a pure drive. **Avoid tolls** (Settings → Trip preferences → Driving preferences) Keeps the drive leg off toll roads entirely. Worth reaching for when the toll is the thing that made driving to the station look expensive. **Avoid highways** (Settings → Trip preferences → Driving preferences) Keeps drive legs off expressways. It usually lengthens the drive, which in turn shifts which station is worth driving to. **Transit agencies** (Settings → Trip preferences) Turn an agency off and all of its routes go, including the riding half of a Park & Ride. Turning off commuter rail is the fastest way to see only subway park and rides. **Sort routes by** (Settings → Trip preferences) Best, Fewest Transfers, Cheapest or Calmest, applied across every mode at once. Park & Ride is ranked on the same scale as everything else, never given its own bracket. Every one of these is a preference stored on your device and sent with the trip, so changing one and planning again is the whole loop. Nothing here needs an account. ## Get more out of it - **Set the radius to what you would actually drive** The default is a compromise. A rider who will happily drive 25 minutes and a rider who will drive five want genuinely different stations, and this is the one number that tells Reroute which of them you are. - **Turn on Include parking cost before you compare on price** With it off, a drive that ends in a paid lot and a drive that ends in your own driveway cost the same on the card. With it on, they do not, and Cheapest starts meaning something. - **Try the trip backwards** If you commute in by transit and need the car at the far end, the reverse shape is the one you want. Reroute builds both directions when you have not pinned a station, so the answer is usually already in the list. - **Pin the station when you already know it** If you always park at the same lot, choose it as the transfer point and Reroute stops shopping around. You can also type an address instead of a station when the car lives somewhere that is not a lot at all. - **Watch the ranking, not just the Park & Ride tab** The tab shows every candidate that was built, including ones slower than going straight there. The mixed list is where a park and ride has to beat the alternatives to appear at all. ## Good to know - **It needs the transit half** Park & Ride is a drive plus a ride, so when the transit engine is unreachable there is nothing to build and the routes are absent with a warning saying so. Driving and walking carry on working normally. - **Parking is priced from published lot data** Rates come from station parking data and are resolved for the time you would actually arrive, so an evening rate is not billed at the daytime one. Whether a specific lot still has a space when you get there is not something any app can see. - **Weekend and late-night commuter rail is thin** Many corridors run little or no weekend service, so a station that is the obvious answer at 8am on a Tuesday is marked down hard at 8pm on a Sunday. That is deliberate, not a bug in the scoring. - **Some trips are rejected after they are built** A candidate that ends up mostly driving, or wanders far past the straight-line distance, or leaves you a long way from the door, is thrown away rather than shown. A park and ride that is really just a drive is not an answer. ## Under the hood The transit half of every Park & Ride comes from the same self-hosted MOTIS engine that plans a pure transit trip, so a station is only ever offered if a real itinerary exists from it at the time you are travelling. The drive legs come from Mapbox's traffic-aware directions, which is also where the congestion colouring on the map comes from. Station candidates are drawn from the loaded GTFS schedules plus a station parking dataset, and scored on a proximity taper: value falls off smoothly with the length of the driven leg rather than rewarding a midpoint of the trip. An earlier version rewarded a drive-ratio sweet spot and systematically talked riders past the nearest useful station; the taper replaced it, and the reasoning is written up as an architecture decision record in the repository. Toll pricing for the 407 is not a badge with nothing behind it. The stretches actually driven are projected onto the tolled corridor, allocated across the published zones, and priced from the operator's own rate chart for the time of day and direction you would be on it, plus the trip and camera charges. Distance the app cannot confidently place on the priced corridor is reported as unpriced rather than guessed at. ## Frequently asked questions **Does Reroute know if the station lot is full?** No, and it will not pretend to. It knows a lot's published capacity and rate and prices the trip on those, but live occupancy is not published for these lots, so a full lot is the one failure a park and ride planner cannot warn you about. **Can I make it always use the same station?** Yes. Pin the transfer point and Reroute builds through that station only, in whichever direction you chose. You can also type an address as the transfer point when the car is parked somewhere that is not a station lot. **Why is a park and ride sometimes missing from my results?** Either nothing survived, or nothing deserved to. Candidates are dropped when the drive is under half a kilometre, when the station sits well off your direction of travel, when the line through it is closed, or when the finished trip turned out to be mostly driving. If transit routing is unavailable altogether, a warning says so. **Does it work if I do not have a car?** Park & Ride specifically needs a drive leg, so no. Every other mode still works, and turning driving off in your preferences simply removes this shape from the list rather than emptying it. ## Ready when you are. Every way across the GTA, ranked in one list. No account needed. [Launch Reroute](https://rerouteapp.ca/map) ## Report a content error [Give feedback](https://reroute.userjot.com) with this page's URL, the incorrect statement, and supporting evidence.