California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This research investigates the feasibility of offering demand-responsive transit (DRT) service to the general public in situations of low demand density. The study region is AC Transit District 2 which consists of the cities of Fremont and Newark, California.

We developed a methodology to evaluate operating efficiencies of existing bus lines and line segments, and identified areas suitable for DRT service based on year 2001 data. We proposed an alternating strategy of checkpoint DRT service and compared it to other strategies. The report also described the schema for an automated reservation and scheduling system.

Our initial findings are: the service cuts and route changes implemented by AC Transit district 2 after 2001 largely concur with our analysis of the 2001 system; by making very limited additional changes to the fixed routes and using the proposed checkpoint service, AC Transit could have a net savings of 2-3 buses; and finally, this service offers considerable advantage in passenger access, reliability and service cost.