Demand responsive public transport services: best practices in Germany

In smaller cities and rural areas it is not efficient to provide fixed bus services with high frequencies. However, there are opportunities to improve public transport in these areas. During the last 15 years, a lot of flexible systems in Germany have been developed and successfully operated. They offer for relatively low operational cost an alternative form of transport for those people without access to a private car and also for those seeking to support a sustainable and carbon neutral environment. The current economic and environmental climate will make it more and more important to consider public transport also in rural Australia. There are lots of variations regarding the flexibility of scheduling and routing, institutional and operational concepts, booking systems and integration within fixed networks. This paper will present the basic concepts of these demand responsive services (e.g. for call-a-taxi services and demand responsive bus corridor services). It will show and explain some examples and will discuss how these concepts can be adapted to work within an Australian context.