California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

The focus of this project is to study alternative system architectures and ITS technologies that can improve the efficiency of personalized public transit and demand responsive systems such as paratransit. This report reviews available and emerging ITS technologies that have been deployed or are being considered for this industry. We also conducted a survey of commercially available computer aided dispatching software. We list the numerous features offered by these software packages. Also, included in this report is a statistical analysis of travel patterns of a paratransit provider in Los Angeles County. This data analysis forms the basis for our testbed in the second phase of the project. The second phase compares the performance of a strictly curb-to-curb system with a hybrid system that is a mixture of curb-to-curb and fixed route. On nine days worth of data, the analysis showed that shifting some of the demand to a hybrid service route (18.6% of the requests) reduces the on-demand vehicle distance by 16.6% and the overall customer trip time by 8.7% over their current approach.