Last month, Hod Brom, Planning Product Manager, and Weston Shippy, Technical Data Strategist at Optibus, hosted a webinar on what demand responsive transport is, why it stays invisible to the riders who need it, and what agencies can do about it. The session was focused on the planning and discoverability side of DRT, not scheduling, dispatch, or real-time operations. Here's a recap of what they covered.
Public transit is still largely understood through a fixed-route lens, with fixed stops, fixed schedules, and fixed times. Demand responsive transport is a much broader category doing work that fixed routes simply cannot replicate. It serves low-density and rural areas that fixed routes can't reach cost-effectively, fills first- and last-mile gaps in urban networks, and provides curb-to-curb rides that make an entire journey more accessible for passengers with disabilities. It also offers a more private travel experience for vulnerable communities and adapts to changing rider needs faster than fixed-route services ever could.
Despite how much ground DRT covers, it remains largely invisible. In the US, there are actually more demand-responsive routes than fixed routes, and yet most major trip planners don't surface them at all.
Designing and managing demand responsive services comes with a set of challenges that fixed-route planning simply doesn't prepare you for. One of the most common is the tension between informational simplicity and operational reality when defining service areas. The zones that make operational sense don't always communicate clearly to riders, and the ones that are easy to explain don't always reflect how the network actually works on the ground.
Beyond that, planners have to map connections to specific transit hubs, document which locations are available for pickups and drop-offs and which aren't, and manage rules that can shift depending on the time of day or day of the week. For services like paratransit, there's an additional layer around rider eligibility, where the rules governing who can access the service need to be clearly defined and consistently maintained.
What makes all of this particularly difficult is that most of this information ends up scattered and siloed. As Weston put it during the session:
"Agencies are having to manage demand response services with loosely defined parameters, contradictory sources of truth, all siloed from how they plan and conceptualise their fixed route systems."
When we asked the webinar audience how their organisation currently handles demand responsive services, 58% said they run DRT but manage it entirely separately from their fixed network. The tools to bring it all together in a coherent way have historically been few and far between.
To make the solution concrete, Hod walked through a live platform demo built around a planning manager tasked with launching a new DRT service connecting a suburban neighbourhood that fixed routes can't reach. The demo showed what it looks like to work with flexible routes and fixed routes in the same environment, on the same map, in the same route selector — a detail that sounds small but represents a meaningful shift in how agencies can think about their networks as a whole.
Modelling DRT in the platform is only half the picture. The other half is making sure that information actually gets to the people who need it. Hod walked through the workflow in three parts during the demo using a scenario of David, a planning manager at a mid-sized public transportation agency whose job is to design and manage fixed routes together with flexible service across the network.
David recently got a new task: to plan and launch a new DRT service connecting a suburban neighbourhood in Portland that is unreachable with a fixed route. Here's what Hod advised David to do.
Step 1: Define your service zones. The first task, as Hod described, is to "define the service zones where passengers can commute to or where the demand is."
Step 2: Build routes and define matching rules. Next, build the flex route out of these zones and define their matching rules. What are the operating hours? How far in advance does someone need to make a booking for this ride? And what are the rules per pickup and drop-off for this passenger.
Step 3: Publish: from Optibus to the rider. The final step is to get all of that information out of Optibus and into the hands of the rider through GTFS-Flex.
There's an honest discussion in the recording about where GTFS-Flex stands right now, including the fact that Google Transit doesn't currently support it and what that means for agencies thinking about publication. Weston and Hod's take on the path forward is worth hearing directly rather than paraphrased here.
The session closed with a substantial Q&A that covered deviated fixed routes, the boundary between DRT planning and scheduling, how paratransit fits into the picture, and what's next on the roadmap. If you have specific questions about how this applies to your network, there's a good chance something relevant came up — and if it didn't, we're happy to talk it through directly.
You can watch the full recording here, and if you'd like to see how DRT planning works in the context of your own network, get in touch.
Further Reading:
Article: Demand Response Transport & GTFS Flex: Filling Crucial Gaps in the Mobility World
Case Study: How Better Workflows Improve Network Redesign, Passenger Information, and Operator Morale