Demand Responsive Transport

[TheManOnThe172]

Yes, true.

If you were being super-flexible, one thing you could argue for would be for the area to have a fleet of DRT vehicles of various sizes and to use them in various different ways. One is school services as you suggest. Another may be a low demand scheduled service on which you can book to ensure a seat or turn up and take an unbooked one. A third may be you simply have them running on demand when they fill up, e.g. for a shuttle between an awkwardly located railway station and the centre of the town or city (e.g. Cambridge). Another might be a one to many DRT based around a supermarket and its surrounding estates, doing a bookable loop once an hour. Some of those things are done better with a full size bus, sure, and you would still want some fixed routes with big buses, but DRT drivers are cheaper as they're just cars.

Absolutely.

As a start, Lincolnshire use their DRT vehicles for Adult Social Care journeys, Home-School and DRT.

 

[TheManOnThe172]

Roger French has today broken the news that the East Leeds Flexibus scheme is being proposed for closure. Actual costs are reported at £16.03 per trip, but the operator says they are losing a lot of money at the price currently contracted, and seem to think that they would need around £40 per trip to cover their costs.

The paper to the Combined Authority Transport Committee makes for pretty devastating reading, as does the consultants' report (from some time early in 2022). There is also an update on the Action Plan that followed the consultants' report.

The West Yorkshire Combined Authority have spent a fraction under £3m and have now run out of money. Assuming that the committee does vote for closure, all they will have to show for the money will be seven short-range electric minibuses for which there doesn't seem to be an immediate productive use.

Key insights from this £3m scheme:

- The electric vehicles were expected to achieve a range of 100 miles but didn't achieve that even from the start. There is no mention of any contract with the supplier to guarantee the range: it rather sounds like the brochure said "100 miles range", and that was the basis for their scheme design and budgeting. And then: "This situation became significantly worse in October 2022 when regular use of heaters, light and demisters greatly reduced the battery life and mid-day charging breaks had to be introduced in order for afternoon peak journeys to be operated". Ouch.

- They didn't use established DRT software, but were apparently the first customer for "Flexiroute" software.

- Even in a suburban area with multiple vehicles, aggregation was very poor - average 1.38 passengers per trip (not clear how calculated, but note that this is individuals so a couple travelling together counts as two: not wrong, but it flatters the level of "aggregation"). A member of staff (12 hours/wk post as far as I can tell) is mentioned as having been trying to aggregate trips manually to improve the situation.

- Even with low user levels, a test suggested that they were unable to meet 16% of booking requests (so useless as a way of getting to a job, a medical appointment, an exam ...)

- They stopped taking telephone bookings because they couldn't afford enough staff

The consultants' review says (as if it is a great discovery, rather than something that should have been evident at the design stage) "For operational costs to be fully covered, it would require a growth in customers from the current 600/week to 6,333/week, a growth of 955%. ... For full costs to be covered, it would require a growth ... of 1,900%. The above levels of growth are not achievable because there is not the capacity in the service to accommodate this uplift"

My initial temptation was to conclude that this showed that DRT couldn't deliver sensible costs even in a six-vehicle, suburban deployment - but on reading the papers, it seems that the project has been delivered so badly that you can't really draw any safe conclusions from the results. (Unless you are a "small state" politician, in which case you would rub your hands with glee at another case study to support your contention that the public sector can't be trusted to spend money wisely).

 

[Bletchleyite]

My initial temptation was to conclude that this showed that DRT couldn't deliver sensible costs even in a six-vehicle, suburban deployment - but on reading the papers, it seems that the project has been delivered so badly that you can't really draw any safe conclusions from the results. (Unless you are a "small state" politician, in which case you would rub your hands with glee at another case study to support your contention that the public sector can't be trusted to spend money wisely).

I remain of the view that the only way to make these schemes work is:

1. To not only allow but encourage pre-booking (e.g. by way of discounts for doing so) because if you have a set of journeys well in advance you can far better co-ordinate vehicles to increase occupancy. In Milton Keynes it's just a subsidised taxi service for those who can get a journey. Subsidising the use of Uber or Bolt would be cheaper.

2. To concentrate on "many to one"/"one to many" routes, e.g. a vehicle or two dedicated to a supermarket or railway station with journeys timed appropriately that you can book on. This is also similar to some of the older-generation schemes based around e.g. a market town.

I wouldn't say DRT is flawed, but I would say VIA's model of DRT is fatally so - if you've got enough demand to make journeys match up ad-hoc, you've got enough demand for a fixed bus route.

 

[Taunton]

The consultants' review says (as if it is a great discovery, rather than something that should have been evident at the design stage) "For operational costs to be fully covered, it would require a growth in customers from the current 600/week to 6,333/week, a growth of 955%. ... For full costs to be covered, it would require a growth ... of 1,900%. The above levels of growth are not achievable because there is not the capacity in the service to accommodate this uplift"

My initial temptation was to conclude that this showed that DRT couldn't deliver sensible costs even in a six-vehicle, suburban deployment - but on reading the papers, it seems that the project has been delivered so badly that you can't really draw any safe conclusions from the results. (Unless you are a "small state" politician, in which case you would rub your hands with glee at another case study to support your contention that the public sector can't be trusted to spend money wisely).

I'm afraid this is what happens when competent transport professionals are trumped by know-nothing politicians. Electric bus AND demand-responsive both together? That's piling uselessnesses one on top of the other.

If they are looking at a financial assessment, that makes it worse, as such schemes, for the few passengers they get, generally have a preponderance of elderly/disabled etc on free passes.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I'm afraid this is what happens when competent transport professionals are trumped by know-nothing politicians. Electric bus AND demand-responsive both together? That's piling uselessnesses one on top of the other.

Electric buses are the future. They are not "useless".

DRT isn't useless, just the VIA implementation is very poor almost to that point.

 

[duncombec]

I wouldn't say DRT is flawed, but I would say VIA's model of DRT is fatally so - [...]

Appreciating you were making a general point, but the Leeds scheme did not use VIA... in fact, the Consultants report specifically stated it as an example of other software.

It appears that leaving the actual vehicle issues aside, one of the major problems of this scheme was the fact they fudged the existing AccessBus software for wider use - it notes more than once the issue of being able to book a journey up to 52 weeks in advance, without any form of payment requirement and thus no incentive to cancel if you can't/don't/won't use that booking, which can easily block out the vehicle(s) for other users. Frankly, even the proposed reduction to 12 weeks seems excessive for most journeys!

For those interested, the consultants report linked to by @TheManOnThe172 also includes ridership figures for ArrivaClick in Leicestershire, which they use as a comparator.

 

[MotCO]

I commented on Roger French's blog at what stage should the National Audit Office be interested in undertaking a Value for Money audit. Tme and time again, DRT schemes fail financially because the income levels just do not stack up, and it is mostly public money (is Section 106 technicall public mone?) that is used to bail them out.

 

[Hophead]

To paraphrase and expand an earlier comment of mine in one of the preceding pages......

The likelihood of a random group of people wanting to make approximately the same journey to approximately the same destination at approximately the same time is pretty close to zero. If there is a reasonable number of people wanting to make that journey, I'm sure the contributors to this forum can suggest a solution. If there is not, then your local taxi firm has a solution, which won't be troubling the taxpayer.

Of course, you could run a timetabled service, with the option to deviate on demand. There are several examples which have mostly run successfully for many years. But this isn't going to make any money for the consultants and salesfolk who are the only ones turning a profit in these schemes. Photo opportunities and buzzword-filled press releases are limited as well.

 

[Bletchleyite]

There might be places this sort of service is suited for, but for a local authority which one can cross in two and a half hours by foot on the longer axis conventional bus services would probably be better.

I don't think automatic many to many DRT is suitable for anywhere. Journeys simply don't line up in both time and both ends, so it ends up being a subsidised taxi service but costing far more to run than one. MK Connect (Milton Keynes) is similarly an abject failure, and it seems to have been recognised that it isn't lining journeys up by the fact that some of the vehicles are now conventional 5 seat EV cars.

In my view, the only DRT that works is where one end point is fixed and you can do a route every half hour/hour connecting outlying places to that point then going back to drop off, thus you do get the journey synergies. And it would be viable to make things like Watford Click work this way by e.g. basing vehicles at Watford Junction station and doing loops based on a specific hourly train arrival/departure.

One thing that I do recall, though, is that a bus professional I know who was looking at offering commercial DRT reckoned fares would need to be about £5 single to break even, and that was about 10 years ago so more now. So it only works at all for subsidised operations, and isn't necessarily cheaper than fixed route in a lot of cases.

 

[RT4038]

I don't think automatic many to many DRT is suitable for anywhere. Journeys simply don't line up in both time and both ends, so it ends up being a subsidised taxi service but costing far more to run than one. MK Connect (Milton Keynes) is similarly an abject failure, and it seems to have been recognised that it isn't lining journeys up by the fact that some of the vehicles are now conventional 5 seat EV cars.

In my view, the only DRT that works is where one end point is fixed and you can do a route every half hour/hour connecting outlying places to that point then going back to drop off, thus you do get the journey synergies. And it would be viable to make things like Watford Click work this way by e.g. basing vehicles at Watford Junction station and doing loops based on a specific hourly train arrival/departure.

One thing that I do recall, though, is that a bus professional I know who was looking at offering commercial DRT reckoned fares would need to be about £5 single to break even, and that was about 10 years ago so more now. So it only works at all for subsidised operations, and isn't necessarily cheaper than fixed route in a lot of cases.

Being involved in such things, it is somewhere between £12 & £18 (depending on geography, demographics and operating costs of course). The algorithms are just not good at putting multiple bookings on the same trip, for various reasons, and it has hard to see how this can be improved without a much more onerous booking process and, as you say, severely restricting the journeys that can be undertaken [ which will reduce the market anyway] . Most of the passengers are likely not train journey orientated and want other destinations, not necessarily conveniently on a line of route!

 

[RogerOut]

I don’t think DRT is worth the cost.

It sounds to me that that they are just providing a cheap taxi service for people in rural areas, many of whom probably have their own car.
But it’s way cheaper than a taxi and probably cheaper than using their own car , so they book DRT. I mean for £2 quid it’s a bargain!

Things like hospital appointments, so parking doesn’t need to be paid for. As an example.

Many people in these rural areas aren’t hard up anyway.

It’s just undercutting taxi drivers and paying drivers to sit around for much of the day.

Improved bus services in the answer.

 

[JKP]

According to a Councillor on Cambridgeshire Live the subsidy is £42.31 per passenger journey for the West Hunts Ting DRT operated by Vectare!

 

[Bletchleyite]

According to a Councillor on Cambridgeshire Live the subsidy is £42.31 per passenger journey for the West Hunts Ting DRT operated by Vectare!

Ouch.

So a free taxi would be significantly cheaper.

 

[GusB]

According to a Councillor on Cambridgeshire Live the subsidy is £42.31 per passenger journey for the West Hunts Ting DRT operated by Vectare!

Could we have the link to and the relevant quote from the article, please?

 

[Deerfold]

Ouch.

So a free taxi would be significantly cheaper.

So long as that doesn't cause a strike in people wanting to use the service.

 

[markymark2000]

Some interesting stats that I would like to share is from Denbighshire Council via Freedom of Information (Request made by What Do They Know, URL below)

Buses - a Freedom of Information request to Denbighshire County Council

I have 2 requests in this one FOI and I hope you are able to assist with them all Firstly, I am wanting to make a comparison of usage between the fixed bus routes 40 (the Prestatyn town bus), 66 and the Fflecsi service which replaced them. To assist with that, could you please provide monthly...

www.whatdotheyknow.com

For anyone wanting the full details and more accessible viewing of the figures, I encourage you to click above. For me to have the full tables on this post would cause it to be excessively long.

Denbighshire has 3 Fflecsi schemes and each one replaced a fixed service route. Here is the passenger numbers and costs and what they show is that costs are up and passenger numbers are down. Ruthin is hard because the area it serves is quite rural so passenger numbers will be hard to come by and it replaced a low frequency fixed bus serving lots of villages. It's the only 'success' if you can call it that. Prestatyn 40 carried more people at the start of the big Covid lockdown on the fixed route, than it did in December 2022 on Fflecsi, costs up £18k per year. The Denbigh service is about 1,000 pax per month down on Fflecsi versus when it was a fixed route, costs up by £12k per year (notes apply).

 

[bussnapperwm]

West Midlands Bus On Demand is making some changes

Changes to the West Midlands Bus on Demand service

Changes to the West Midlands Bus on Demand service | Transport for West Midlands

www.tfwm.org.uk

Changes to the West Midlands Bus on Demand service

From 22 December 2023, West Midlands Bus on Demand will no longer serve Wellesbourne Campus, Kenilworth, Leamington Spa or Warwick Parkway Station.

This is because funding was previously provided through the Future Mobility Zone, in partnership with Warwick University.

As the funding will now come fully from Transport for West Midlands, we have decided to focus on the West Midlands area to ensure the best value for money for taxpayers.

Passengers are advised to use the following alternative bus services:

11 - Coventry to Leamington via University, Kenilworth (operated by National Express Coventry)
U1 - University of Warwick to Warwick Gates (operated by Unibus)
U2 - University of Warwick to Leamington
X18 - Coventry to Stratford via Warwick

Warwick University are working on an alternative service for passengers travelling to Wellesbourne Campus. We will publish any information here as soon as this has been confirmed.

 

[Peakrider]

Question: I've looked at the Yorbus website and cannot find the answer. Is there a fee to register? I may have missed it because I was struck by the statement:

by the county councillor, the Executive Member for Access. Councillors and other officials need to learn not to over-promise; underplay the offer, then you can go back to the media and state what a success it has been.

There were 7 roadshows for the service prior to the service starting, 2 of which were at tourist locations (a National Trust property and a theme park); since the current bus service to these places amounts to no more than 2 journeys in each direction on any day (some days, no journeys at all) that most arrived by their own transport. It would be wonderful to convert them to bus use but there are unlikely to be any more than a few irregular users. You might get others to take a journey or two just to try it out. By all means promoting these leisure locations to users of the service. However, I suspect those staffing the roadshows were able to persuade attendees to sign up, if it is free and the staff are pushy.

What would be interesting is how many different users made a trip.

I don't know the area at all well, I spent a very pleasant week just north of there many years ago and it would seem like an area where DRT may be successful, but not if the current bus services are still running. It is one or the other, I doubt the area can support both. And not if you promise Gold and find a lesser metal,

One thing that I would say in support of NYCC is that, although I take your point on the ratings, they can hardly ask those who have not used it. It would be like Tripadvisor asking me to rate Disney World when I've never been to the US!

I think “Only asking people who have used it” means the lucky few who have succeeded in being granted a journey.
Many other people may have used it but not been allocated a journey. A bus service should not be a lottery.
The whole concept is clearly flawed because it is trying to be all things to all people with limited resources. Umpteen schemes have been tried over the years, they guzzle subsidy and are then quietly dropped.

 

[TheManOnThe172]

... Umpteen schemes have been tried over the years

It was so depressing to see so many DRT launches in Roger French's 100 events video (and a long list of closures in one of the captions.)

Can anyone suggest a "pure" DRT service that is getting anywhere near an acceptable cost per ride? (Pure = anywhere to anywhere, without any timetable, and not distorted by well-loaded school runs or well-funded Adult Social Care runs)

 

[Dai Corner]

It was so depressing to see so many DRT launches in Roger French's 100 events video (and a long list of closures in one of the captions.)

Can anyone suggest a "pure" DRT service that is getting anywhere near an acceptable cost per ride? (Pure = anywhere to anywhere, without any timetable, and not distorted by well-loaded school runs or well-funded Adult Social Care runs)

Every taxi firm in the country, especially as the number of passengers in the car increases.

There are no commercial bus-based DRT services as far as I'm aware which, to me, confirms the concept is completely flawed.

 

[edwin_m]

This is in a US context but describes the fundamental problem with this type of service: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-19/the-inflexible-problem-with-flexible-microtransit.

And unlike fixed-route bus service, microtransit’s efficiency and service quality do not naturally improve as ridership grows. The more passengers it draws, the more costly it becomes.

The hard part comes when public officials try to scale microtransit service without breaking their budget, limiting how many trips people can take, or morphing into something that looks a lot like fixed-route service. And that challenge is immense.

 

[RT4038]

Every taxi firm in the country, especially as the number of passengers in the car increases.

The economics of the taxi industry are skewed by the presence of Local Transport Authority contracts for home to school transport. In the county I live in, most (virtually all) of the taxis are contracted ['well funded' no doubt] at least 07h45-08h45 and 15h15-16h15 on Schooldays - it is very difficult, if not impossible, to hire a taxi in the normal way during those hours. If these contracts did not exist, taxi fares would be higher for everyone and there would be fewer operating.

 

[Dai Corner]

The economics of the taxi industry are skewed by the presence of Local Transport Authority contracts for home to school transport. In the county I live in, most (virtually all) of the taxis are contracted ['well funded' no doubt] at least 07h45-08h45 and 15h15-16h15 on Schooldays - it is very difficult, if not impossible, to hire a taxi in the normal way during those hours. If these contracts did not exist, taxi fares would be higher for everyone and there would be fewer operating.

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

 

[Man of Kent]

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

Well yes, and that's how some authorities operate "traditional" Dial a Ride for less mobile passengers. But the continual growth in pupils with Special Educational Needs (SEN) means that many are making lone long journeys to schools far away from home because they cannot be accommodated any nearer, utilising a vast fleet of taxis in the process.

 

[Taunton]

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

Taxis are used for these oddball journeys where a bus is impractical.

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".

I'll gloss over that many of the children taken by taxi to school have this done because they have some aspect of special needs, and three hour trips are completely impractical for them.

 

[RT4038]

Well yes, and that's how some authorities operate "traditional" Dial a Ride for less mobile passengers. But the continual growth in pupils with Special Educational Needs (SEN) means that many are making lone long journeys to schools far away from home because they cannot be accommodated any nearer, utilising a vast fleet of taxis in the process.

In my county, not only SEN but also due to school capacity issues for ordinary pupils. Pupils moving into certain areas only being able to be accommodated in their year some distance away. Once allocated then remains until pupil finishes school. Add in children in care accommodated far away (shortage of foster parents etc). As you say, a vast fleet of taxis, in fact the taxi 'Peak Vehicle Requirement' is virtually determined by this. And we wonder why Local Authorities are under such financial pressures!

 

[daodao]

Newport Bus is reverting back to a fixed timetable ordinary bus route from Easter 2024 to replace its existing DRT route 31.

DRT31 (Marshfield, St Brides, Castleton) becomes routes 31A & 31C​

The DRT31 service is being replaced by the new routes 31A & 31C. The last day of the DRT31 will be Saturday 30 March. The new routes start after Easter Monday on Tuesday 2 April 2024.

DRT31 (Marshfield, St Brides, Castleton) becomes routes 31A & 31C

Introducing your new routes 31A & 31C serving Castleton, Marshfield, St Brides, Lighthouse Park and Duffryn via Cardiff Road

www.newportbus.co.uk

 

[MotCO]

Newport Bus is reverting back to a fixed timetable ordinary bus route from Easter 2024 to replace its existing DRT route 31.

DRT31 (Marshfield, St Brides, Castleton) becomes routes 31A & 31C

Introducing your new routes 31A & 31C serving Castleton, Marshfield, St Brides, Lighthouse Park and Duffryn via Cardiff Road

www.newportbus.co.uk

The publicity from Newport also includes the following:

"The DRT31 service is being replaced by the new routes 31A & 31C. The last day of the DRT31 will be Saturday 30 March. The new routes start after Easter Monday on Tuesday 2 April 2024.

Did you find what you were looking for? If not, try these -​

Request a DRT (Demand Responsive Transport) service for the rural areas around Marshfield (DRT 31), Bishton (DRT 62) and Goldcliff (DRT 63)"​

A lack of joined up communications?

 

[Westnat]

The publicity from Newport also includes the following:

"The DRT31 service is being replaced by the new routes 31A & 31C. The last day of the DRT31 will be Saturday 30 March. The new routes start after Easter Monday on Tuesday 2 April 2024.

Did you find what you were looking for? If not, try these -​

Request a DRT (Demand Responsive Transport) service for the rural areas around Marshfield (DRT 31), Bishton (DRT 62) and Goldcliff (DRT 63)"​

A lack of joined up communications?

Not really, as DRT31 still runs until the end of March, and DRT62 and DRT63 will still continue.

 

[Dai Corner]

Not really, as DRT31 still runs until the end of March, and DRT62 and DRT63 will still continue.

For the record, these are all traditional DRT services where passengers book by phoning the depot the day before they want to travel. They started long before the app-based DRT branded Fflecsi in Wales came and went in the urban parts of the city.