Could service integration make DRT viable?
Has anyone got Boris’s number?
According to the papers, quite a lot of us have.
Well, if we’re going to have a fighting chance of making a success of DRT, we’re going to need it.
I’ve written on these pages previously that Demand Responsive Transport provides a fantastic customer experience - and is near-certain to lose money.
But the starting position that DRT loses money is a pretty important one given the amount of Government money being put into rural mobility.
If local authorities are willing to stand behind the annual subsidies of these projects, then great. But if they’re treating the funding as seed funding, then many of these pilots will prove that customers love the service - only for them to be shut down when the money runs out.
That is, unfortunately, a feature of DRT for all the reasons I’ve previously described but the problem can be mitigated a bit. Unfortunately, the way to do that is really hard work as it involves working across departments.
DRT - so good they did it thrice
While DRT is highly unlikely to be profitable, the losses can be minimised by maximising the utilisation of resources. The smaller the scheme, the more likely there will be unsustainable peaks and troughs in demand.
Unfortunately, even before DRT is introduced, most areas have three existing DRT schemes.
Where I live in Waltham Forest, East London, we have transport for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities , which is run by HCT Group:
We also have Patient Transport Service for hospital outpatients, which is provided by the NHS - both in-house by the London Ambulance Service and outsourced to contractors such as G4S:
And we have Dial-A-Ride, which is operated by Transport for London, which provides transport for people less able to use standard public transport:
In places with DRT pilots, these services are typically overlaid on top:
Pretty soon, therefore, the 17 areas that have won funding under the Rural Mobility Fund will have four separate fleets of DRT minibuses.
While there are differences, there are more similarities between these propositions than differences. They all:
Use wheelchair-accessible minibuses
Operate on-demand
Require pre-booking
Pick up and set down in residential areas, not main road bus stops
Moreover, they peak at different times and have different wait time expectations. SEND transport starts early and peaks in the 0800 hour. Dial-a-Ride only starts at 0800 and peaks in the middle part of the day. “Public transport” DRT typically assumes passengers only have to wait 10-30 minutes, whereas hospital patient transport SLAs can permit waits of up to an hour, and sometimes up to two hours.
It feels like a combination of different peaks and different wait time expectations creates considerable potential to maximise utilisation.
It’s not impossible to envisage regional DRT services operating under contract to local authorities and the NHS, while also serving customers directly.
We still need Boris’s number
Unfortunately, while it’s not impossible to envisage, it’s incredibly hard to make happen.
The problem is that “public transport” DRT is the responsibility of the Department of Transport, school transport is the responsibility of the Department for Education while patient transport is the responsibility of the Department for Health. These reporting lines only meet with the Prime Minister.
Aligning all these would be a super-human effort but maybe it is worth considering. Given there are seventeen areas that have won funding under the Rural Bus Fund, maybe at least one of these could trial making just this super-human effort.
There is no guarantee it will succeed but it would almost certainly provide the best chance of making a DRT service long-term financially viable.
