Demand Responsive Transport

Conventional bus services have fixed routes and fixed times. They have bus stops and the bus turns up according to the published timetable. In a sparsely populated area, for example in the countryside, this means the bus has to go round every village that it is meant to serve even when no-one wants to travel. This can lead to torturous routes, low frequencies and poorly used services.

In response to such problems in both rural and urban areas, a more flexible form of bus travel has been devised which matches the service more closely to the customers' needs. It has been given the name demand responsive transport - DRT for short.

The taxi is perhaps the simplest form of demand responsive transport. You ring it up from wherever you are, it picks you up and takes you to wherever you want to go. It is convenient but not cheap. The challenge was to create comparable levels of quality, convenience and affordability in the form of a new type of bus service.

In transport terms, DRT fills a gap between the big bus and the taxi [drtbus].

The bus is shared with other passengers with similar requests within a given area. So the journey may take longer than a taxi, but the advantages are that the service can be of high quality, almost door to door and be available on a regular basis. Even taxis can be hard to find outside central urban areas.

The personal stops can be at or near peoples homes, farms, housing estates or flats and the destinations can be virtually anywhere within a given zone depending on how the scheme is structured. Some buses travel anywhere to anywhere within a zone, while others have some sort of core route from which they deviate.

As well as getting close to door to door travel, booking in itself creates better security for the passengers. And, in addition drivers tend to like the services and enjoy the extra responsibility of seeing that their passengers, many of whom they come to know, are safely home, shopping and children unloaded.

Schemes also tend to use smaller buses (8 - 25 seats) which are better suited to lower levels of use and can get down narrow, twisting roads and turn round, more easily.

As well as the potential for improved service to the passenger, DRT makes it possible to serve a wider area with fewer buses.