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Demand-Responsive Transport for Students in Rural Areas: A Case Study in Vulkaneifel, Germany

In rural areas with a low population density, the demand-responsive transport (DRT) is considered a promising alternative to the conventional public transport. With a fleet of smaller vehicles, DRT provides a much more flexible and convenient service. This characteristic makes the DRT also a potential mode of transport to serve the school children in rural areas. If the DRT vehicles are used to serve the school children, then the funding for conventional school buses (or adapted public transport schedules) can be reinvested in the DRT system. This may help to relieve the financial burden experienced by the DRT operators and enable the operation of a large scale DRT service in a rural area. In this study, a demand model for school commutes based on real-world, open-source data for Landkreis Kelheim, a rural region in Germany, is built. Then a feasibility study is carried out using an agent-based transport simulation. In the feasibility study, various setups and operational schemes are explored, which is followed by a systematic cost analysis. Results from the simulations show that an annual budget of 1639 Euro per student is sufficient to maintain and operate a fleet of DRT vehicles that can transport all the students in the region from home to school on time in the morning. During the remaining time of the day and on school holidays, the vehicles can be used for conventional DRT service for the public.

In this webpage, you can find useful supplementary information and data to the paper.

Open Vulkaneifel scenario (school transport model)

The school transport model is open soruce: https://svn.vsp.tu-berlin.de/repos/public-svn/matsim/scenarios/countries/de/vulkaneifel/openVulkaneifel/school-traffic/

Scripts

The scripts are avialbe on GitHub: https://github.com/luchengqi7/project-space

Additional Documents

\TODO link to the additional document

For more details on MATSim, please visit https://matsim.org/

Contact

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us: Chengqi Lu: lu@vsp.tu-berlin.de