Demand Responsive Transport

[fandroid]

Having been involved in organisation of a similar operation, an "ambulance" (actually seated) which picked up about 10 patients to take them to hospital for appointments, you ended up taking about 3 hours to do all the pickups, so in this instance the first on/last off child, quite possible living just a few miles away, would need to be away from home at 0600, and not returned until 1900. Delays in pick up occurred for various reasons, on occasion to the extent that patients arrived at the hospital after the clinic they were coming to had closed. In the words of one of the medical receptionists at the hospital "that ambulance pick up service is our worst nightmare".

This absolutely fits with my experience as a patient who had to use hospital transport. Even when I was the only passenger, the trip was gruelling in comparison with normal scheduled public transport. In a way I was lucky because I fitted in with one driver, who lived fairly near to me and so he was the default choice when allocating transport for
me. That meant I got a service that was reasonably reliable in terms of pick-up times at home.

Back to the topic - All the DRT services around me in north Hampshire (CanGo) have reverted to fixed timetables.

Has the Commons Transport Select Committee taken an interest at all in DRT?

 

[stevieinselby]

A many-to-one operation like that seems ideal for one minibus instead of a dozen taxis. It could do DRT in between.

Just because the children may be going to the same school doesn't mean they live anywhere close to each other.
Taxis are usually only used for children going to special schools, and special schools often have a huge catchment area. Most do use minibuses where it's feasible, but to pick up all of the pupils living in outlying areas by minibus would lead to some children having excessively long journeys.
Councils are not going to be frittering away huge sums of money on taxis for home-to-school transport if there are any viable options that are more cost-effective!

 

[Dai Corner]

Just because the children may be going to the same school doesn't mean they live anywhere close to each other.
Taxis are usually only used for children going to special schools, and special schools often have a huge catchment area. Most do use minibuses where it's feasible, but to pick up all of the pupils living in outlying areas by minibus would lead to some children having excessively long journeys.
Councils are not going to be frittering away huge sums of money on taxis for home-to-school transport if there are any viable options that are more cost-effective!

I know of children who get taxis provided to mainstream schools even though they live near the school bus route and happily catch service buses by themselves at other times.

But we're getting off the subject of this thread.

 

[ALEMASTER]

The North East Derbyshire DRT scheme has now launched.

"This service is for people who do not have access to an alternative bus service, or whose local journeys require them to change from one bus service to another.

The operating area covers the districts of North East Derbyshire and Bolsover and the borough of Chesterfield. Residents of these areas can book journeys which begin and end in the operating area. Outside the operating area, residents may also travel directly to Kings Mill Hospital in Sutton in Ashfield and Alfreton railway station.

Journeys can be booked through the app or tel: 01773 317173."

Details https://www.roadxs.com/travel-derbyshire-on-demand/

 

[RT4038]

I know of children who get taxis provided to mainstream schools even though they live near the school bus route and happily catch service buses by themselves at other times.

But we're getting off the subject of this thread.

This could be because the school bus route vehicle is full and provision of a taxi is cheaper than another bus?

 

[Trainman40083]

The North East Derbyshire DRT scheme has now launched.

"This service is for people who do not have access to an alternative bus service, or whose local journeys require them to change from one bus service to another.

The operating area covers the districts of North East Derbyshire and Bolsover and the borough of Chesterfield. Residents of these areas can book journeys which begin and end in the operating area. Outside the operating area, residents may also travel directly to Kings Mill Hospital in Sutton in Ashfield and Alfreton railway station.

Journeys can be booked through the app or tel: 01773 317173."

Details https://www.roadxs.com/travel-derbyshire-on-demand/

Until the lifts go in at Alfreton (work just started), those with access issues might do better at Chesterfield station....

 

[Llandudno]

The North East Derbyshire DRT scheme has now launched.

"This service is for people who do not have access to an alternative bus service, or whose local journeys require them to change from one bus service to another.

The operating area covers the districts of North East Derbyshire and Bolsover and the borough of Chesterfield. Residents of these areas can book journeys which begin and end in the operating area. Outside the operating area, residents may also travel directly to Kings Mill Hospital in Sutton in Ashfield and Alfreton railway station.

Journeys can be booked through the app or tel: 01773 317173."

Details https://www.roadxs.com/travel-derbyshire-on-demand/

This is a very large geographical area served by, I believe just 2 vehicles.

The area is reasonably well served by conventional, commercial services and it appears as though there is nothing stopping people booking the DRT for journeys such as

Chesterfield to Bolsover/Staveley/Clay Cross/Dronfield etc where there are commercial services running every 15 minutes, which could prevent people living in areas with little or no service being unable to make a booking?

Fares are charged at £4 (which is double the current £2 bus fare cap) but ENCTS and Derbyshire Wayfarer ticket holders can travel for free.

 

[Taunton]

The USA style of school buses is interesting, they are commonly driven by either one of the moms, or even a senior high school pupil, who live at the outer end of the routing, the bus is parked overnight by their house, and does the inward pickup run. If by a senior pupil it parks at the school all day, if by the mom they drive home, and come back in the afternoon. They are a particular type of vehicle, built on light truck chassis with separate spartan bodywork.

I'm sure though that Health & Safety would find 101 ways not to do this over here.

 

[Simon75]

The USA style of school buses is interesting, they are commonly driven by either one of the moms, or even a senior high school pupil, who live at the outer end of the routing, the bus is parked overnight by their house, and does the inward pickup run. If by a senior pupil it parks at the school all day, if by the mom they drive home, and come back in the afternoon. They are a particular type of vehicle, built on light truck chassis with separate spartan bodywork.

I'm sure though that Health & Safety would find 101 ways not to do this over here.

Not just Health and Safety , it would be illegal

 

[TheManOnThe172]

This is a very large geographical area served by, I believe just 2 vehicles.

The area is reasonably well served by conventional, commercial services and it appears as though there is nothing stopping people booking the DRT for journeys such as

Chesterfield to Bolsover/Staveley/Clay Cross/Dronfield etc where there are commercial services running every 15 minutes, which could prevent people living in areas with little or no service being unable to make a booking?

Fares are charged at £4 (which is double the current £2 bus fare cap) but ENCTS and Derbyshire Wayfarer ticket holders can travel for free.

How utterly depressing.

I met with Derbyshire County Council staff last summer to share my analysis of the Yorbus operation in North Yorkshire - underlining not just the horribly low utilisation (97% of trips could have been covered by a normal taxi - even if you required that no strangers would ever be asked to sit immediately next to each other), but also the complete unsuitability of DRT as a means of getting people to and from work, education, or anything else that required you to be sure of getting a tolerably-timed ride every time you needed one.

And yet here we go, with BSIP money seemingly burning a hole in a council's pocket, and no shortage of companies willing to relieve them of it for yet another doomed scheme. In the early days, politicians could just have got away with professing a determination that it would be "different this time". But now there have been so many DRT schemes that have failed for identical reasons (astronomical cost of running a bus like a taxi, and many use cases where the loss of predictability makes DRT useless) that "vacuous optimism" really isn't still credible as an excuse for the millions being wasted. BSIP spending should surely have strings attached to avoid pure vanity projects. One reasonable use would be a genuine experiment - to test out something where there is both genuine uncertainty and a worthwhile forward plan if one of the possible answers is proven. Another would be to "pump prime" a service that had a genuine prospect of being affordable after the BSIP-funded period, if the BSIP spending were to achieve the hoped-for momentum-building. DRT schemes don't fit either of these cagegories.

This new DCC scheme does have one innovation that I spotted. The operators (roadxs.com - who I hadn't come across before) at least have the honesty to warn that customers need to have plenty of spare time: "Allow plenty of time before your appointment to make sure you don’t arrive late. Note that you may be on the bus for up to 75 minutes." They can't, of course, explain how you choose an appointment time that that you can be sure of reaching by DRT given that many appointments need making many weeks ahead, and the DRT booking only opens 7 days ahead. Nor what to say to an employer who proposes to fire you for failing to show up to work again because DRT couldn't offer you a ride.

 

[duncombec]

[...] BSIP spending should surely have strings attached to avoid pure vanity projects. [...]

Isn't one of the problems that BSIP spending does indeed have strings attached, namely a specific list of projects agreed to by the Department for Transport (DfT), for whom Demand Responsive Transport is a big draw, and thus likely to get approval?

I hope I'm not misremembering if I say the first round of BSIP allocations seemed to favour local authorities whose plans fitted DfT buzzwords... It certainly isn't a pot of cash the authority gets first and works out how to spend later. The meetings needed to be before the bid, not after the allocation.

 

[deltic]

The USA style of school buses is interesting, they are commonly driven by either one of the moms, or even a senior high school pupil, who live at the outer end of the routing, the bus is parked overnight by their house, and does the inward pickup run. If by a senior pupil it parks at the school all day, if by the mom they drive home, and come back in the afternoon. They are a particular type of vehicle, built on light truck chassis with separate spartan bodywork.

I'm sure though that Health & Safety would find 101 ways not to do this over here.

They can often do more than one run in the morning and evening meaning pick up times can be very early in the morning. Evenings may not be so bad as they will do a run at usual school finishing time and then later for those doing after school activities.

 

[TheManOnThe172]

"Spiralling costs lead to rural bus service closure"

BBC reports: 'Essex and Suffolk Demand Responsive Transport (DaRT) bus services and Arrow Taxis announced the closure "with great regret" on social media'

A rural bus and taxi service has announced it has shut with immediate effect due to falling passenger numbers and spiralling costs.

Essex and Suffolk Demand Responsive Transport (DaRT) bus services and Arrow Taxis announced the closure "with great regret" on social media, external.

The company said it was aware of several services being taken over by other companies.

Essex County Council said it will update residents about the services when it is able to.

In a statement on social media, the company said: "We are so sorry for this, but had no alternative options.

"The cause was losses of passenger numbers since 2020 and spiralling costs."

It thanked passengers for their support.

"You have been a wonderful bunch of people and we loved serving you, and absolutely hate having let you down," it said.

The company said it believed the 45 route between Bradwell and South Woodham Ferrers was being taken over by Stephenson's of Essex.

It also said the 332/3/4 routes were being taken over by company Vectare.

It said for other routes people should contact Essex County Council for further information.

And yet still we see new schemes announced. How can local councillors approve new schemes when the evidence is so clear that these schemes have no special magic to offer - if you operate a bus like a taxi, you get the worst, not best, of both worlds: high costs and emissions; few passengers.

 

[Geordie driver]

I think it's a need to be seen doing something, even though the evidence in front of them says it's probably not going to work.

 

[DDB]

It may well be a case there is government money that councils are not allowed to use for anything else.

 

[65477]

With the new Essex Contracts starting tomorrow and Arrow loosing routes, is this not just a case of DarT /Arrow seeing that the remaining routes are not viable at the contracted cost.

Having lived in one of the villages affected I knew of people who relied on this service to get to and from work. I worry about what will happen on Monday morning.

All the Travel Essex sites says at the moment is that there will be "a gap in service from Monday" on services 10, 12, 45, 99a, 322/323/324 and DaRT 3. If still shows the F315 Halstead - Sudbury as running today, it's last scheduled day of operation.

 

[Cesarcollie]

With the new Essex Contracts starting tomorrow and Arrow loosing routes, is this not just a case of DarT /Arrow seeing that the remaining routes are not viable at the contracted cost.

Having lived in one of the villages affected I knew of people who relied on this service to get to and from work. I worry about what will happen on Monday morning.

All the Travel Essex sites says at the moment is that there will be "a gap in service from Monday" on services 10, 12, 45, 99a, 322/323/324 and DaRT 3. If still shows the F315 Halstead - Sudbury as running today, it's last scheduled day of operation.

The thread heading is misleading. Whilst using minibuses, most of what Arrow ran was scheduled rural tendered local bus services. It’s not really another DRT failure.

 

[65477]

The thread heading is misleading. Whilst using minibuses, most of what Arrow ran was scheduled rural tendered local bus services. It’s not really another DRT failure.

I don't understand why you quoted me in your post as I was not responsible for the title of the thread. However this could be seen as a DaRT issue in the the timetabled, but run on demand in villages service F315 was due to cease today and was to be absorbed into DaRT 5 based around Braintree. It's the future provision of DarT 5 the is in doubt. Also Arrow did run the Dart service around Saffron Walden which has gone to Flagfinders. Elsewhere in Essex the Digigo demand service seems to be doing OK.

 

[Mollman]

I think we need to view this differently. DaRT wasn't one of the resent trendy app based DRTs but a long established service, at least 20 years old. Some of my former colleagues helped establish it and said the reason that it worked (pre-Covid) was that it was run by a taxi operator (lower cost) with a local presence thus helping promote it. It was brought in as the area it served was more difficult to serve with a scheduled fixed route network rather than some tech company promising a revolution.

 

[Cesarcollie]

I don't understand why you quoted me in your post as I was not responsible for the title of the thread. However this could be seen as a DaRT issue in the the timetabled, but run on demand in villages service F315 was due to cease today and was to be absorbed into DaRT 5 based around Braintree. It's the future provision of DarT 5 the is in doubt. Also Arrow did run the Dart service around Saffron Walden which has gone to Flagfinders. Elsewhere in Essex the Digigo demand service seems to be doing OK.

Sorry - didn’t mean to tag you - just jumped onto the last posting in the thread! But the Arrow business comprised taxis, home to school, tendered bus, and (a small remaiNing) element of DRT - long established as noted above. Rather than ‘another DRT failure’ the title might more accurately say ‘another operator failure - an operator which ran a couple of DRT services as part of a wider busines’!

 

[Titfield]

As someone who has watched the London Country Harlow Dial A Ride Film from the mid 70s it must surely have been obvious to anyone that the costs of this type of service would far outweigh the revenue.

 

[65477]

A summary of the outcome of the Harlow experiment can be read at https://trid.trb.org/View/67678. I did have a copy of the whole report but deposited it with the Essex Records Office some years ago.

 

[James101]

Is there any fundamental difference between DRT and traditional council ‘dial-a-ride’ services that have existed in rural areas for decades? It has always seemed to me that dial-a-ride is viewed as a commendable community service with no expectation to be commercial or even efficient; but DRT, doing the same job, is quickly written off as outlandish waste.

 

[Glasgowbusguy]

The only DART that actually seems to to work is SPTs dial bus which seems to have sweet spot of having areas of large population with then areas of smaller population

 

[Dai Corner]

Is there any fundamental difference between DRT and traditional council ‘dial-a-ride’ services that have existed in rural areas for decades? It has always seemed to me that dial-a-ride is viewed as a commendable community service with no expectation to be commercial or even efficient; but DRT, doing the same job, is quickly written off as outlandish waste.

The fundamental difference is that traditionally passengers had to book the day before and the route was fixed accordingly. The new app-based ones attempt to satisfy as many passengers as possible by changing the route on the fly.

This raised the expectations of passengers who thought they were getting a cheap/free taxi service and sponsors who thought that increased ridership would more than pay for the back office system and in some cases enable them to withdraw subsidised scheduled routes but still claim the area had a bus service. Generally speaking, both groups were disappointed.

 

[stevieinselby]

Is there any fundamental difference between DRT and traditional council ‘dial-a-ride’ services that have existed in rural areas for decades? It has always seemed to me that dial-a-ride is viewed as a commendable community service with no expectation to be commercial or even efficient; but DRT, doing the same job, is quickly written off as outlandish waste.

I think there's a difference in intent.

Councils generally use dial-a-ride for one of two purposes:

• An accessibility service for people who can't use normal bus services even though there is a comprehensive network in place
• A subsidised service for ultra-rural areas where fixed-route services are even less efficient and cost-effective.

App-based DRT is generally sold as being an alternative to fixed-route services with the expectation that it will be more cost-effective, even though it's pretty much impossible for that to happen.
It puts the cart before the horse – it's a solution looking for a problem. It's sold to councils on the premise of what capacity it could deliver in a theoretical environment where passengers behaved as the developers would like them to, rather than on the basis of what patronage and costs are actually likely to be in a realistic, real-world deployment.

Basically, councils use dial-a-ride to provide transport, whereas developers sell apps to make money.

 

[TheManOnThe172]

DRT software vendors Padam have published a paper about measuring DRT performance, with a "Worked Example" using recent data from Cheshire West. There are many different measures discussed, but two which struck me - percentage of time running with passengers ("Loaded") at 35%, and Passengers Per Vehicle Hour, which was 3.27 in March 2024 and 2.92 in May 2024. Both are in line with the analysis I did on the North Yorkshire Yorbus service (which was abandoned as too expensive).

Padam say that the "reported cost per passenger" is around £10 per passenger, but basic maths suggests a subsidy of around £18 per passenger journey: £1.075m subsidy over three years, average say 3.1 passengers per vehicle hour, 125 vehicle hours per week. (Can anyone help me understand the discrepancy?)

So, yet another DRT scheme that shows that if your demand is too fragmented to make a timetabled service viable, even the cleverest DRT software isn't going to aggregate demand to a useful extent. If you insist on offering a taxi-like service using a bus, the only elements of bus operation you get are bus-level emissions and bus-level running costs.

 

[Bletchleyite]

So, yet another DRT scheme that shows that if your demand is too fragmented to make a timetabled service viable, even the cleverest DRT software isn't going to aggregate demand to a useful extent. If you insist on offering a taxi-like service using a bus, the only elements of bus operation you get are bus-level emissions and bus-level running costs.

Completely agree.

I'd love to see such stats for a DRT scheme where you fix one end, though, e.g. at a supermarket or railway station. I think you might get very different results then. Many-to-many is just too complex for journeys to line up, but where there's a given vaguely timebound destination it's fairly likely you will get some alignment at least. If for instance you had a vehicle based at a supermarket that went round the locality picking up and dropping off once an hour, that could also work. But then equally in both of those cases you arguably might as well just run an hourly timetabled bus service instead, because your vehicle is there and fuel isn't the biggest cost, and you'll probably get more people using that than DRT because it's simpler - rock up and pay cash/card, no faffing with apps or telephone calls, and the time you need to leave home is known and fixed, and the place you board is too.

 

[stevieinselby]

I'd love to see such stats for a DRT scheme where you fix one end, though, e.g. at a supermarket or railway station. I think you might get very different results then. Many-to-many is just too complex for journeys to line up, but where there's a given vaguely timebound destination it's fairly likely you will get some alignment at least. If for instance you had a vehicle based at a supermarket that went round the locality picking up and dropping off once an hour, that could also work. But then equally in both of those cases you arguably might as well just run an hourly timetabled bus service instead, because your vehicle is there and fuel isn't the biggest cost, and you'll probably get more people using that than DRT because it's simpler - rock up and pay cash/card, no faffing with apps or telephone calls, and the time you need to leave home is known and fixed, and the place you board is too.

That's quite similar to the model that Lincolnshire have been using for over 20 years with their CallConnect service. Each bus is based around a town centre and serves the villages around the town. Traditionally it used to be that buses would run at set times (usually every hour, on the hour) and go to whichever villages had a pick-up/set-down requested, although with the move to an app-based service it may now be more flexible than that.
The main reason for running that service as DRT is that it allows you to cover a much greater range of destinations. A bus could have 50 or 60 potential stops at various villages and hamlets around the hinterland – there's no way you could plot a sensible route to get round all of them because they are scattered and dispersed, it could take 3 or 4 hours to visit all of the stops. So running a fixed route timetabled service would mean most destinations only got 2 or 3 buses a day and passengers would be guaranteed to have a long journey (even if it was divided up into loops of about an hour each, rather than doing the whole shebang in one go), rather than giving passengers flexibility to travel at convenient times and with the journey only taking as long as it needs to in order to serve the people actually travelling that hour.

This is the only way I can see DRT making any sense, in very sparsely populated areas with very small villages and hamlets scattered widely and not falling nicely onto obvious travel corridors that could sensibly form a scheduled service, and providing connections from those villages and hamlets to the nearest town (where yes, they should be flexible about serving the high street, railway station, hospital, etc).

 

[edwin_m]

Completely agree.

I'd love to see such stats for a DRT scheme where you fix one end, though, e.g. at a supermarket or railway station. I think you might get very different results then. Many-to-many is just too complex for journeys to line up, but where there's a given vaguely timebound destination it's fairly likely you will get some alignment at least.

I think this is sort of what they are doing in Nottinghamshire. https://www.nottinghamshire.gov.uk/transport/travel-notts/travelling-by-bus/nottsbusondemand

Nottsbus On Demand services do not follow a fixed timetable. Instead, they operate on a flexible, on demand basis, allowing you to travel between bus stops and designated points within the travel zone, where there are currently no local bus routes.

You can also use the service to connect to other bus services if you want to go further out of the area.

This isn't totally clear but seems to be steering people towards starting or finishing each journey at one of the "designated points", though it looks like it's actually possible to request anywhere to anywhere within the same zone. The zone maps linked off that page show typically around five designated points per zone, including interchange with trains, fixed route buses, adjacent DRT zones and even planes in one case.