Demand Responsive Transport

[edwin_m]

I see the main problem of DRT in urban areas is that few people want the same journey at the same time. Even if there was a common transport objective such as a shopping centre or sports centre, passengers will want to board at different, random places, so a round-the-houses trip is inevitable unless there is only one person on the bus (which seems to be the norm!).

Indeed. If enough people wanted the same journey at the same time then the best provision would be a fixed route service not DRT. So DRT is by definition confined to an unprofitable twilight zone.

 

[Tetchytyke]

My experience of DRT has been very limited, really limited to community voluntary operations in the northern Lake District. And seeing the complaints about Bus Vannin's attempts to impose DRT on the north of the island.

I'm not a believer.

DRT only really works where you have a mass of people who want to go to roughly the same place at roughly the same time. But if you have that, you may as well run a scheduled service.

If you don't have that critical mass, you end up bouncing round the countryside trying to pick up scraps. An underwhelming experience for people forced to go on a Magical Mystery Tour before getting where they want to go, and certainly not very cost-effective. And annoying for anyone who can't travel when they want to- the supposed benefit of DRT- because the bus is somewhere else. Or who can't travel at all because they didn't realise they needed to travel at 6pm the night before, when bookings closed.

The only advantage I can see is not having to run a bus if nobody wants to travel.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The only advantage I can see is not having to run a bus if nobody wants to travel.

But then you still have to have the bus and driver ready in case it is wanted - so all you save is a bit of diesel.

The only way you save big is when it's operated by a taxi firm out of their general fleet so you don't pay for any of it if it's not needed. (That's how the German Anruf-Sammeltaxi[1]/Linientaxi setup works - but that is a timetabled service that only operates on demand, not DRT in the sense we're discussing - some bus routes have it for their last couple of journeys if they carry a passenger once every blue moon).

I think where you do get some gain is where you have a market town, one bus and one driver for one shift and a stack of quite spread out villages and want to give everyone a couple of hours at the market. If you timetable it, you end up doing "1st Tuesday of the month village X, 2nd Tuesday of the month village Y" etc. If you do DRT, you can gain from the fact that not everyone is going to want to go to market on those specific days (some will want every week, some twice a month, some randomly) so you do run a "timetabled service" but you plan it each week based on who wants it.

It really doesn't work for random journeys, as everyone has found every time they've tried it, because they tend not to coincide on time and journey - and when they do, you might as well run a traditional timetabled fixed-route bus service.

[1] "Telephone-arranged shared taxi" is probably the best translation. The same abbreviation actually works in the UK as "Arranged Shared Transport/Taxi" and I think that term is used somewhere or other in the UK.

 

[Tetchytyke]

But then you still have to have the bus and driver ready in case it is wanted - so all you save is a bit of diesel.

I said that originally, but then deleted it because it depends on how strict you are with the booking deadline. If you're not strict then yes, all you're saving is a bit of diesel. And if you are strict, "sorry, you didn't book yesterday" doesn't really encourage bus use.

 

[edwin_m]

Consider four villages, each of which has a 50% probability of someone wanting to travel into town sometime between 0900 and 1000, but a single vehicle can only serve any two of them during that time. A scheduled service would therefore need two vehicles. A demand-responsive service needs one vehicle on average, because on average passengers in two villages will want the service. A notional service provider with only one vehicle would have let someone down on days when they get three requests, and have a vehicle and driver idle for some of the time on the days when there are one or no callers, so it makes sense for a DRT provider to cover multiple services in a region to smooth out these fluctuations by lending and borrowing vehicles between nearby service areas. This sort of scenario shows how DRT might realise a cost saving by having fewer vehicles and crews than a scheduled service.

But if the service is popular enough that twice as many people are interested in using it, then the probability of at least one passenger wanting to travel from a particular village goes up to 75%. It's a bit late at night to do the probability calcs, but there is now a much greater probability of needing the same two vehicles as a scheduled operator. I think this explains why DRT vehicles hardly ever carry more than a handful of passengers!

 

[James101]

A problem I see when DRT is being written off as too expensive is that it’s cost isn’t usually being compared to it’s replacement, usually because it’s replacing something lost long ago.

Tees Flex is set to cost £3m during its pilot. It largely provides a ‘new’ service to rural communities cut off from the commercial network. These communities, however, were generally provided with a scheduled subsided service until around 2010. Comparing the £3m cost of Tees Flex versus the equivalent current-day costs of the entire erstwhile Boroughbus network of 5 local authorities for 3 years then DRT starts to look economical.

 

[PG]

One possible advantage of running DRTs is that it helps to identify passenger needs and flows, so that a fixed stop service at the required times might be more effective. However, any transport manager worth his salt would know this anyway.

Yes any half decent transport manager is going to know this anway. However DRT funding sometimes is funnelled through councils who may not have the first idea of what constitutes a viable passenger base.

I've also wondered if some DRTs blank out i.e. restrict booking for an hour in the morning and afternoon to allow the vehicle to perform a school journey, which helps to spread the expense of provision, much as many rural bus routes do too.

 

[Bletchleyite]

it makes sense for a DRT provider to cover multiple services in a region to smooth out these fluctuations by lending and borrowing vehicles between nearby service areas. This sort of scenario shows how DRT might realise a cost saving by having fewer vehicles and crews than a scheduled service.

Or you just get a taxi firm which has accessible vehicles to operate it (so they can bring one in if it is needed, but not if it's not). They have lots of vehicles, so allocating one or two on any given day is no great problem and costs them nowt as taxi drivers are only paid per journey - an idle vehicle costs the operator literally nothing.

Or does PSVAR require an accessible vehicle if individual fares are charged? If so that's a bit silly as this sort of DRT is different, the key to taxi-operated DRT is that an accessible vehicle is available (and not more difficult to get than any vehicle), not that it's actually used on any given journey unless one of the booked passengers needs it. Can shared vehicle DRT operate purely on a taxi licence?

 

[PG]

Can shared vehicle DRT operate purely on a taxi licence?

Short answer = Yes it can be run purely on a taxi licence.
It depends on the size of the vehicle used and how the drivers are licenced.

 

[edwin_m]

Or you just get a taxi firm which has accessible vehicles to operate it (so they can bring one in if it is needed, but not if it's not). They have lots of vehicles, so allocating one or two on any given day is no great problem and costs them nowt as taxi drivers are only paid per journey - an idle vehicle costs the operator literally nothing.

Or does PSVAR require an accessible vehicle if individual fares are charged? If so that's a bit silly as this sort of DRT is different, the key to taxi-operated DRT is that an accessible vehicle is available (and not more difficult to get than any vehicle), not that it's actually used on any given journey unless one of the booked passengers needs it. Can shared vehicle DRT operate purely on a taxi licence?

The fare paid for a commercial taxi gives a good idea of what the economics of DRT would be without subsidy, even if corners were cut such as using (in many cases) clapped out inaccessible vehicles and drivers from the gig economy.

Uber has been trying to convince some smaller cities in the States to make their public transport network entirely demand-responsive through the mechanism of subsidizing riders on, you guessed it, Uber. The rates on offer reflect the fact that Uber is intrinsically loss-making and supported by tech investors, and their business model is to hope that by the time gravity reasserts itself enough of the competition will have been eliminated that they can charge what they like.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The fare paid for a commercial taxi gives a good idea of what the economics of DRT would be without subsidy, even if corners were cut such as using (in many cases) clapped out inaccessible vehicles and drivers from the gig economy.

For what it's worth, a friend who was the guy in charge of one of the community transport operations, was involved in a project to work out what he'd charge if the service was offered commercially, and reckoned it would be viable to launch a service like that entirely commercially, because vulnerable people would trust their drivers and assistance quality more than they would trust a taxi firm. I think the figure bandied about was about £5 per single journey, which at the time under discussion was probably above (but not much above) the average private-hire taxi fare in MK. (Fares with the local operators in MK are considerably lower than Uber and Hackney carriages, largely because the main cost of taxis is driver time, and with most roads 60/70mph you can do a job in MK much faster than elsewhere).

This never seems to have actually happened, though, so perhaps the conclusion was that not enough people would pay it.

Uber has been trying to convince some smaller cities in the States to make their public transport network entirely demand-responsive through the mechanism of subsidizing riders on, you guessed it, Uber. The rates on offer reflect the fact that Uber is intrinsically loss-making and supported by tech investors, and their business model is to hope that by the time gravity reasserts itself enough of the competition will have been eliminated that they can charge what they like.

Uber is a real oddity - it was a useful disruptor, but I'm not sure what else it achieves other than causing controversy and burning money. It's more expensive (quite considerably so - their fares are probably about a third higher than MK's private hire operators) and yet doesn't offer anything they don't. As a result it's not that big in MK, its main advantage is that if you're travelling there from elsewhere it's a known system, which is why I've used it in other cities and abroad.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Uber has been trying to convince some smaller cities in the States to make their public transport network entirely demand-responsive through the mechanism of subsidizing riders on, you guessed it, Uber. The rates on offer reflect the fact that Uber is intrinsically loss-making and supported by tech investors, and their business model is to hope that by the time gravity reasserts itself enough of the competition will have been eliminated that they can charge what they like.

Which isn't going to happen in the US because most public transport is nationalised, the main exceptions being the long distance coach companies and the airlines.

It might be more likely to happen in the UK if they had a decent go at the bus companies, but they aren't going to do that with the level of fares they are charging, other than for people sharing a vehicle. So they might I suppose kill night buses (which are barely economic anyway and often suffer antisocial behaviour, so I'm unconvinced the operators care all that much) but they aren't going to kill off the market for people taking the bus to work, and to kill off the market for people driving to work you'd have to go lower still.

The MK private hire operators just about compete with the buses for one person (roughly twice the price but much more convenient and far quicker) and are about the same for two, but MK is unique in the UK, pretty much nowhere else (other than maybe one of the other New Towns) could you do a 4 mile (each way) job from the station and be back ready for the next one in half an hour, which is what makes the economics of those low fares that would never work in London, say. But demand is very distributed, so Uberpool isn't overly likely to work, which is the only way I could see them getting fares down to bus levels. Even in London there is no chance at all of matching TfL's subsidised £1.50 fare.

 

[edwin_m]

Which isn't going to happen in the US because most public transport is nationalised, the main exceptions being the long distance coach companies and the airlines.

Here's an example: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/07/22/is-on-demand-transit-the-future-not-so-fast/

Pinellas transit planners thought cutting bus service on little-used routes and supplementing them with Uber rides made sense financially. And they found support among county leaders like Florida State Senator Jeff Brandes.


“You need to bring in people who think differently,” Brandes told the Shared Mobility Center in 2016. “The first/last mile issue has been around forever. … Uber and Lyft have only been around for six years. It’s exciting to be able to use technology to help address some of these age-old problems.”

It didn't work, as explained in the article, but it does demonstrate that Uber is trying to supplant bus service run by government-owned operators.

 

[65477]

Just discovered that the TV channel Talking Pictures has as short film on the Harlow Dial a Ride at 16:40 on Thursday 25th. available on various TV services

 

[PeterC]

My experience of DRT has been very limited, really limited to community voluntary operations in the northern Lake District. And seeing the complaints about Bus Vannin's attempts to impose DRT on the north of the island.

I'm not a believer.

DRT only really works where you have a mass of people who want to go to roughly the same place at roughly the same time. But if you have that, you may as well run a scheduled service.

If you don't have that critical mass, you end up bouncing round the countryside trying to pick up scraps. An underwhelming experience for people forced to go on a Magical Mystery Tour before getting where they want to go, and certainly not very cost-effective. And annoying for anyone who can't travel when they want to- the supposed benefit of DRT- because the bus is somewhere else. Or who can't travel at all because they didn't realise they needed to travel at 6pm the night before, when bookings closed.

The only advantage I can see is not having to run a bus if nobody wants to travel.

Except that you already get the magical mystery tour on rural fixed routes even if there are no passengers for the other villages.

DRT is, in my view, best suited for semi rural areas lacking in centralised villages but with lots of hamlets and ribbon development. Trouble is that they keep trialling it in urban areas.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Except that you already get the magical mystery tour on rural fixed routes even if there are no passengers for the other villages.

DRT is, in my view, best suited for semi rural areas lacking in centralised villages but with lots of hamlets and ribbon development. Trouble is that they keep trialling it in urban areas.

I think the key to it is that it has a fixed point of demand, typically the larger (market) town in a rural area with a load of randomly scattered villages. Large towns just don't really work like that in most cases, if you do it based on an infinite number of origin-destination pairs you don't get the level of demand to make it viable - and if you do, you probably just planned a viable fixed-route bus service.

Even in the rural area, if the villages are laid out in a useful pattern to serve with a fixed route (be that linear, "beads on a string", a figure 8 pattern or whatever) you might as well just do that even as a "every second Tuesday when it's market day" type route - it only really comes into its own when they're genuinely scattered.

 

[TheManOnThe172]

DRT is, in my view, best suited for semi rural areas lacking in centralised villages but with lots of hamlets and ribbon development. Trouble is that they keep trialling it in urban areas.

But in rural and semi-rural areas, it is home-to-school transport that provides the peak demand, and so local authorities end up paying the fixed costs of full-sized buses to take secondary pupils to/from school. Even if the off-peak flows are ideal for DRT (ie radial trips to a common centre), serving those passengers with smaller vehicles means covering the fixed costs of those vehicles in addition to covering the fixed costs of the full-sized vehicles. And that extra fixed cost will surely dwarf any savings that come from reduced mileage through better-optimised scheduling or lower per-mile costs from using smaller vehicles.

In rural areas, DRT may be able to offer more efficient use of full-sized vehicles by cutting out meanders to villages and hamlets that have no passengers for a particular service. But the cost savings may not be enough to cover the costs of offering the necessary fully accessible booking system. It certainly won't be a game-changer in making useful savings in overall costs.

So, I can't see how DRT is the answer for authorities trying to provide comparable levels of mobility at a lower cost than timetabled services. It may be able to offer a fig-leaf service at lower total cost, but with the cost-per-passenger journey generally much higher than for a service bus, that saving in total cost is only possible if you serve many fewer passengers. Derbyshire's 2016 proposal for DRT to replace subsidised service was envisaging spending 20% of the previous subsidy to deliver 5% of the number of journeys, ie four times as expensive per passenger served. The scramble to book scarce places becomes a bit like the National Lottery, offering the alluring prospect that "it could be you", even though it probably won't be. And that uncertainty makes it impossible to book hospital appointments (often needing a choice of date and time 6 weeks ahead or more) or fixed-train tickets for long-distance travel because you won't know until a week ahead whether you'll get a ride, or when it might be if you do hit lucky.

 

[RT4038]

But in rural and semi-rural areas, it is home-to-school transport that provides the peak demand, and so local authorities end up paying the fixed costs of full-sized buses to take secondary pupils to/from school. Even if the off-peak flows are ideal for DRT (ie radial trips to a common centre), serving those passengers with smaller vehicles means covering the fixed costs of those vehicles in addition to covering the fixed costs of the full-sized vehicles. And that extra fixed cost will surely dwarf any savings that come from reduced mileage through better-optimised scheduling or lower per-mile costs from using smaller vehicles.

In rural areas, DRT may be able to offer more efficient use of full-sized vehicles by cutting out meanders to villages and hamlets that have no passengers for a particular service. But the cost savings may not be enough to cover the costs of offering the necessary fully accessible booking system. It certainly won't be a game-changer in making useful savings in overall costs.

So, I can't see how DRT is the answer for authorities trying to provide comparable levels of mobility at a lower cost than timetabled services. It may be able to offer a fig-leaf service at lower total cost, but with the cost-per-passenger journey generally much higher than for a service bus, that saving in total cost is only possible if you serve many fewer passengers. Derbyshire's 2016 proposal for DRT to replace subsidised service was envisaging spending 20% of the previous subsidy to deliver 5% of the number of journeys, ie four times as expensive per passenger served. The scramble to book scarce places becomes a bit like the National Lottery, offering the alluring prospect that "it could be you", even though it probably won't be. And that uncertainty makes it impossible to book hospital appointments (often needing a choice of date and time 6 weeks ahead or more) or fixed-train tickets for long-distance travel because you won't know until a week ahead whether you'll get a ride, or when it might be if you do hit lucky.

There are often many school services (particularly special needs etc) that don't require full size buses, and some County Councils (Warwickshire for instance) use these on on mid-day special shopping services, which could be DRT. However, you are quite right that the cost of the booking system required can mean that fixed route is actually cheaper (with maybe the return services 'drop off' only and only going to points where pax require)

 

[Dai Corner]

Newport Transport are trialling 'Fflecsi' in the City in partnership with Transport for Wales (ie the Welsh Government). It replaces three conventional routes.

I haven't had the opportunity to try it myself but have read social media reports from users.

One problem seems to be that advance bookings aren't allowed. You have to phone or use an app to request a journey when you're ready to travel and take pot luck on when the bus will be able to pick you up. This makes it useless for time critical journeys such as going to work or to an appointment or catching a train.

 

[Tetchytyke]

Except that you already get the magical mystery tour on rural fixed routes even if there are no passengers for the other villages.

I appreciate your point, but I don't think it's to the same extent and it is at least consistent. You know the bus route, you know how long it will take to get where you're going.

And that uncertainty makes it impossible to book hospital appointments (often needing a choice of date and time 6 weeks ahead or more) or fixed-train tickets for long-distance travel because you won't know until a week ahead whether you'll get a ride, or when it might be if you do hit lucky.

Precisely. The supposed benefit of DRT- that services are more flexible- only works if you can rely on there being a bus roughly when you need there to be one.

Here Bus Vannin replaced fixed bus routes to the rural Northern villages with DRT, except for the school buses and, bizarrely, Sunday services. Needless to say it has been less than popular, judging by the papers. So they have now had to put in certain runs from the biggest village- Jurby- at specific times and with no need to pre-book, as well as a guarantee you won't be turned away if you're waiting. So the DRT service is now just a convoluted normal bus

 

[Ashley Hill]

To answer the original question about resources two examples from Essex.

Back in the 1970's there was an experimental DaR service in Harlow and this was undertaken with academic research - I think the final report was by Cranfield University. The Dar service was replaced at the end of the trail with a conventional bus route using the same Find Transit mini buses.

Essex County Council were still replacing conventional rural bus routes with DaR until very recently so the minutes of meetings or a Freedom of Information request to the council might provide results.

Just discovered that the TV channel Talking Pictures has as short film on the Harlow Dial a Ride at 16:40 on Thursday 25th. available on various TV services

For those that missed "Dial a Bus in Harlow" it is repeated on Talking Pictures TV on 01 July at 0535 and 05 July at 2005 (subject to alteration). It's well worth watching.

 

[MotCO]

For those that missed "Dial a Bus in Harlow" it is repeated on Talking Pictures TV on 01 July at 0535 and 05 July at 2005 (subject to alteration). It's well worth watching.

And it is being repeated now (16.50 on 15 July). It is a 15 minute film or so and seems to be a 'progamme filler' so may appear again when there is a gap between films or programmes.

It is also interesting seing how the presentation of documentaries and the technology used has changed over the last 50 years, not to mention society.

 

[anthony263]

Newport Transport are trialling 'Fflecsi' in the City in partnership with Transport for Wales (ie the Welsh Government). It replaces three conventional routes.

I haven't had the opportunity to try it myself but have read social media reports from users.

One problem seems to be that advance bookings aren't allowed. You have to phone or use an app to request a journey when you're ready to travel and take pot luck on when the bus will be able to pick you up. This makes it useless for time critical journeys such as going to work or to an appointment or catching a train.

Its expanded and fflecsi is on offer now along adventure travels G1 service route expanded to include the heath hospital. The optare solo sr has been specifically branded and has been out today as shown on video by our MD on our blink app.

feedback so far has been positive from customers

 

[Dai Corner]

Its expanded and fflecsi is on offer now along adventure travels G1 service route expanded to include the heath hospital. The optare solo sr has been specifically branded and has been out today as shown on video by our MD on our blink app.

feedback so far has been positive from customers

Also, from Monday, the Stagecoach 152 in the Tonypandy area.

Rhondda 152 - Transport For Wales

www.fflecsi.wales

 

[anthony263]

Probably one of the Mercedes benz sprinters will be used.

I remember thec152 when we used to do it with ex London dual door darts

 

[James101]

I've just been looking at Tees Flex, the council (Tees Valley Combined Authority) funded, Stagecoach operated, app-based demand response travel system. It largely replaces the Boroughbus Network which has been eroded over the last ten years or so. My opinion is that, if we but aside pre-perceptions of what we think a bus service should be and asses it on the merits of getting people to where they need to be, it looks like one of the better attempts at making demand responsive travel work.

Now, I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I was wondering what the forum though on how the app has been zoned, or more accurately re-zoned in the latest update. Firstly, the Hartlepool Zone:



The active zones seem painstakingly carved out to very specific borders. Comparing this to the town's local network, exclusively operated by Stagecoach, the live zones exclusively cover areas unserved by the commercial network - I.E. what the service is intended to achieve.

Similarly in Stockton (a mixed bag of Arriva & Stagecoach for local stage services), the town centre zone is restrictive, but it does allow users to make a journey from the town to Teesside Park as well as making a journey between any intermediate points en route. Rather than being split into two zones, like Hartlepool Town Centre & Navigation point are, the zone is stretched along the path Arriva's X12 take along it's fairly recent commercial expansion into the shopping park:




Moving across into Darlington, full Arriva territory since Stagecoach famously bowed out. Here the travel zones get wider still, allowing journeys between the rail stations, from the town centre to the hospital and much of the residential area around it. Much of the area near the hospital is in the catchment area of Arriva's 19 and the app even allows Tees Flex users to make journeys which have a 10 minute headway from Arriva, such as Town Centre to North Road Morrisons or along Woodland Road:


Finally across to Redcar, another exclusively Arriva district in terms of registered services. Tees Flex starts to certainly look a little fishy here, where the central zone is a simply oblong through most of the town:


According to the Tees Flex website, there's some reasonably complex rules about how passengers can travel from 'Primary' and 'Secondary' zones and which in theory restricts such journeys that could be made with Arriva. In practice however, the app doesn't prevent users from booking any journey, regardless of zone status or length. To re-iterate my original point, if this is assessed as how successful is Tees Flex at moving passengers to where they want to be then I think its all great, whether the seeming discrepancies in zoning are fair to Arriva, however, is questionable.

 

[upasalmon]

Arriva also have "Arriva Click" which is an app based DRT in Leicester and Liverpool.

Not in Liverpool any more sadly.

 

[Boo_]

Manchester Local link has been running over 10 years.

Local Link shared minibuses

tfgm.com

Local Link areas

Check if you're eligible to use a Local Link service in your area

tfgm.com

 

[anthony263]

I've recently taken over driving the G1 Fflecsi service now for NAT on Saturdays and it's been picking up quite nicely. Quite a few people only know about it because they've seen the bus go past, or parked in the car park at Taffs Well station.

The local council and TfW are planning on expanding promotions of this service and Stagecoach have had some new Mercedes Benz Stratas for the new Fflecsi bus services in the valleys.

 

[anthony263]

I've found the last few Saturdays demand has picked up quite a bit