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
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