All aboard! How on‑demand public transport is getting back on the road
During the early stages of the pandemic, Transport for Wales (TfW) decided to try something new. In May 2020 it launched fflecsi, an app-based service that allows people to book a shuttle minibus from “floating bus stops” near their homes directly to their destination.
Available in 11 locations across Wales, the service was an immediate hit: in five weeks passenger numbers grew 150%, and in its first 12 months it served 50,000 trips. Best of all, 9% of its riders were people who hadn’t previously used public transport. As one passenger said: “This is too good to be true. This is Pembrokeshire, we don’t get transport like this.”
Wales wasn’t the only place experimenting with demand-responsive transport (DRT). Pilot DRT projects also sprang up in the suburbs of Munster in Germany, Osaka in Japan and Lone Tree in Colorado.
Lukas Foljanty, a shared-mobility enthusiast and market expert, keeps track of the different DRT schemes around the world and thinks we may have reached a tipping point. There are already at least 450 schemes around the world, but last year 54 new projects emerged within a three-month period.
The roots of DRT are in community transport, often door-to-door shuttles for older or less mobile citizens, and we’ve known for some time that it could have huge environmental benefits. A 2005 study modelling the impact of a theoretical DRT network in the Helsinki metropolitan area concluded there could be a huge impact. It said: “In an urban area with 1 million inhabitants, trip aggregation could reduce the health, environmental and other detrimental impacts of car traffic typically by 50 to 70%, and if implemented could attract about half of the car passengers, and within a broad operational range would require no
Read more on theguardian.com
