Workshop on Demand Responsive Transport Services

Posted by: Pays des vallons de Vilaine - Date: 15h December 2011

24th of November 2011 Pays des vallons de Vilaine organised a very successful workshop on Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) with around 70 participants, including ten speakers.

The day was organised in four round table sessions based around the following questions:
- How are DRT services conceptualised?
- How do users reserve their trip?
- How can we reach the correct target group of users?
- After a year of exploitation, how do we evaluate the service and what opportunities are there to improve it?

 
Speakers during the first roundtable

Each speaker presented their local experience and then the audience was solicited to fuel the debate. The discussions were very rich. On the one hand, participants posed very practical questions about prices, issues, details about the services presented. On the other hand, they also had more general questions such as “shall we offer this service to everyone even if they own a car?”, “how can we optimise the vehicles’ route in order to increase the number of passengers and reduce the cost”, “Is demand responsive transport well identified as public transport in the mind of users?”.

It was stated that preliminary studies are necessary to correctly design the service and determine the target audience. In some cases DRT will be focused on non-motorised members of the public, children, elderly and disabled people in order to provide them with a way to travel without relatives. In other cases DRT can be proposed to the general public to reduce the use of private vehicles. In any case, these services need to be optimised either thanks to a private company gathering requests and organising routes or through a dedicated employee in the public body. Communication is seen as a catalyst to reach the public and clarify the way the service functions. Finally, the fourth round table concluded that DRT services should be analysed further, but common indicators are complicated to define since they depend on the specific objectives of the community.

Audience at the workshop