Browsing by Subject "Paratransit"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Evaluating demand responsive transit services using a density-based trip rate metric
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2021) Kaufman, Benjamin; Leung, Abraham; Burke, Matthew
    Demand responsive transit (DRT) is attracting increased attention as a means to provide public transit to low-density populations. This research aims to provide a suite of evaluation metrics with low data requirement and widespread availability, so that operators, funders, regulators, and practitioners can better evaluate the performance of DRT services. Trip numbers can be divided by a number of available variables (period, trip length, population, and density) to create a number of derived metrics. By applying these variables across three different DRT service areas in Logan City, Australia, where other key factors are held constant, one can see how different formulations lead to very different readings of DRT system performance. The results confirm the dilemma of cost efficiency versus equity in service provision in low-density environments. This paper also highlights current data limitations and calls for better data collection to facilitate the development of new evaluation methods for DRT services and a new composite metric that can be used for inter-service comparison.
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    From direct to trunk-and-feeder public transport services in the Urban South: Territorial implications
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2015) Ferro, Pablo Salazar; Behrens, Roger
    In the Global South, many ongoing public transport improvement initiatives are based on a complete restructuring of the existing system. More often than not, plans call for an eventual absorption of incumbent operators into a new “formal” system or for a more radical eradication. These operators are often considered by city authorities to be the cause of inefficient transport systems. When implementing bus-rapid-transit-based plans, public transport improvement initiatives typically propose the transformation of paratransit-based direct services into feeder-trunk-distributor models that introduce new “formal” and “modern” modes. The move from direct services to feeder-trunk-distributor services can, however, have significant implications for travel patterns within the urban territory. Formal feeder-trunk-distributor public transport systems are more rigid than the paratransit-based model they are meant to replace. Some areas of cities in the Global South, generally located in peripheral zones, are growing and changing rapidly, and as such they ideally require a public transport system that is flexible and demand-responsive to fulfill their residents’ basic access needs. With the introduction of formal-only trunk-and-feeder schemes, some of these benefits of paratransit services are lost. Without disregarding the need for paratransit upgrade in terms of operations and business practices, it is argued that complementarity between formal and paratransit services is possible within a feeder-trunk-distributor model. Such complementarity should eventually lead to more equitable and sustainable public transport systems in cities that are changing fast and where the development of paratransit operators has, in one way or another, contributed to the inclusion of the poorest sectors of society in the city.
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    Improving Capacity Planning for Demand-Responsive Paratransit Services
    (Minnesota Department of Transportation, 2008-04) Gupta, Diwakar; Chen, Hao-Wei; Miller, Lisa; Surya, Fajarrani
    This report proposes and evaluates two ideas for improving efficiency and service quality of paratransit operations. For carrying out this analysis, the authors use data from Metro Mobility, the agency responsible for providing ADA-mandated transportation services in the Twin Cities. However, the underlying principles, mathematical models, and algorithms are applicable to a variety of similar transportation operations in urban and rural areas. The first idea is to re-optimize routes developed by Metro Mobility’s route-building software (a commercial product named Trapeze) at the end of each day of booking operations to reduce the total time it takes to serve booked trips. The second idea evaluates the selective use of non-dedicated vehicles and service providers (e.g. taxi services) for lowering operational costs. Mathematical models and computer algorithms are developed for each of these approaches. These are then tested on actual operational data obtained from Metro Mobility. The report shows that a conservative estimate of savings from re-optimization would be 5% of Metro Mobility’s operating costs. Additional savings from the use of taxi service would be in the hundreds of dollars per day. The actual magnitude of these savings would depend on the proportion of customers who agree to travel by taxi.
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    Introduction to special section on paratransit
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2015) King, David
    Over the past few years, private taxi, jitneys, and other paratransit services have blossomed in cities around the world. Scholars have noticed. Two things stand out immediately. First, we don’t know very much about how taxi and paratransit services affect travel behavior and mode choices. Second, we know even less about who uses these systems. Because these services tend to serve niche populations, it is difficult to assess who an “average” rider is. What we do know about taxi services and paratransit is that they are important complements of—and occasional substitutes for—conventional fixed-route transit. This special section of the Journal of Transport and Land Use presents three articles in which the authors examine complementary travel modes to conventional public transit systems. Together these three papers provide evidence of how informal and nontraditional transit operates in conjunction with established transit services as well as competes with certain types of services.
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    Sithutha Isizwe ("We Carry the Nation"): Dispossession, Displacement, and the Making of the Shared Minibus Taxi in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, 1930-Present
    (2018-11) James, Elliot
    This dissertation interrogates the growth of shared minibus taxi vehicles in South Africa over the course of the 20th century – along with their antecedents – to show how a century of forced removals targeting black South Africans in diverse rural and urban communities, homes, and homesteads, and forcibly relocating them to impoverished ghettoes created a “black taxi” revolution (BTR) in late 1970s and early 1980s, while also undergirding a pandemic of “black-on-black” “taxi wars” in the twilight of the racist apartheid regime. In today’s transport technology boom, few remember the history of South Africa’s shared minibus taxi industry, a black entrepreneurial powerhouse inadvertently catalyzed by South Africa’s racist and repressive apartheid state. The 16-passenger shared minibus taxi vehicles were created and increasingly manufactured and marketed to buyers in late 1970s, but had historical antecedents at the turn of the 20th century, as a response to forced removals, racial segregation, and poverty in the urban ghettoes the apartheid state created for displaced black South Africans. Within this environment, taxi operators struggled to get their businesses off the ground in an apartheid economy that privileged private and SATS-backed (read “white”) modes of transport – i.e. buses and trains – and that undercut and forbade black enterprise anywhere but in the homelands. But through diligence and racial solidarity, the taxi industry grew to become the black-owned and operated transport powerhouse it has been since the late 1980s. This is the story of one of South Africa’s revolutionary black enterprises, a story that turned sour in the 1990s with the proliferation of the Taxi Wars. Although few retell the narrative of “the black taxi revolution” now, the story of a successful black business in sub-Saharan Africa in the face of colonial and apartheid restrictions and oppression continues to inspire models of development through entrepreneurship. Moreover, the taxi story still figures into a collective memory of the struggle against apartheid.
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    Towards a simulation of minibuses in South Africa
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2015) Neumann, Andreas; Röder, Daniel; Joubert, Johan W.
    After private cars, minibus taxis are the most common transport mode in South Africa. Especially for low-income citizens living in townships, minibus services are often the only possibility for mobility. Despite the great importance of the mode, there is very little knowledge of routes, fares, and the number of minibuses. Hence, it is difficult to simulate and to understand the influence of this mode on other modes and on transport planning in general. This article presents the development of the first ``close-to-reality'' minibus supply model based on demand and street network only. The approach adopts the survival-of-the-fittest principle, using a co-evolutionary algorithm that is integrated into a microscopic multi-agent simulation framework. The successful application of the approach to a large-scale, real-world scenario in the Nelson Mandela Bay Area Municipality in South Africa shows that it is able to identify the main minibus corridors as well as to find robust service coverage in lower-demand areas. The resulting minibus supply model can then be used for planning purposes (e.g., to investigate aspects of strategic, operational, or regulatory changes).