On-demand public transportation: Current status and report from the conferences

Since many of you are interested in this topic, here is a summary of the seminars on on-demand transportation organized by Breidenbach and Frost, as well as by the VDV on multimodality. Spoiler: The visit was well worth it; there was a wealth of information about our new forms of transportation, and in my opinion, it became clear above all that we still have a lot more work to do on integration and connectivity. Both in terms of operations and software, so that passengers use these services much more and they can truly fulfill their role in the transportation companies’ offerings. Why am I bringing this up in detail here:

Clever Shuttle:

The VDV forum was overshadowed by Clever Shuttle’s bankruptcy. Many wondered how competent transportation providers for on-demand services could be found if it wasn’t going to be the local taxi service. The role of Deutsche Bahn in this context was also subject to critical scrutiny. It will certainly be interesting to see how the market continues to develop. In any case, it shows that a self-sustaining ride-hailing service still poses an immense challenge. Sensible concepts still need to be developed before we can truly transition to autonomous driving.

Utilization and Use Cases

A wide variety of on-demand projects were presented, featuring different approaches from Austria and Germany. Surprisingly, some facts and figures were the same across all service areas:

• Vehicle utilization was similar across the board: 3–4 trips per hour per vehicle, with a pooling rate of around 30–40%, or 1.2–1.7 passengers per trip. What was striking here was that traditional on-demand services with fixed schedules achieved better pooling rates than on-demand services without fixed schedules. This is inherent in the nature of the service, as we have fixed departure times and routes in traditional on-demand services.
• The use cases were not clearly defined at the start of the project. As a result, in many cases, public transportation passengers switched to on-demand vehicles, but hardly any car drivers did.
• Ticket fares varied widely but, in principle, had no incentive effect. Whether an incentive system was created, a surcharge was applied to the shuttle, or guests simply traveled at the public transit fare, an incentive effect was not initially apparent (partly due to the relatively low passenger numbers).

Collaboration with Software Service Providers

It was repeatedly mentioned that while software service providers now offer a very capable standard product, making customizations is often difficult to achieve. This is something I personally address with clients in every project, and it’s important to be aware of this fact. Having a clear product strategy may be very helpful for the provider and results in an affordable product for us. However, this inevitably leads to the on-demand software remaining a standalone product that is difficult to integrate into the transit companies’ passenger information and ticketing systems.

Integration with other software systems: Examples include SWCAR and Switchh

Things got particularly interesting when a transportation company wanted to move away from the standard products offered by on-demand software providers and pursue its own integrations. One example was Stadtwerke Krefeld, which integrated its SWCAR solution into the utility’s own app. The scope of such integrations should not be underestimated and was only possible because there were sufficient internal resources available for implementation.

Another example of this was the well-known Switchh app from Hamburg, which involves a wide range of software service providers, transportation companies, and a large portion of the software department at Hamburger Hochbahn. This app alone requires well over a hundred software developers!

In my opinion, this is where the greatest potential for improvement lies in the future if we want to increase the efficiency of on-demand transportation services. We must ensure that these services are meaningfully integrated into public transit information systems, thereby offering passengers an intermodal travel chain that they can book immediately. Only in this way can we expect real increases in ridership.

Vehicles

As for the vehicles, the electric Mercedes Vito seems to have become the standard choice. As for the LEVC models, which are much more conspicuous, there have been reports of numerous problems with maintenance and the supply of replacement parts.

What happens next?

The pilot projects are underway; we have excellent software and good vehicles, but ridership isn’t quite where we expected it to be, and awareness could be better.

It is now clear where we need to focus our efforts. We need to better integrate our transportation systems, we must do a better job of highlighting the added value of transportation, and we need to focus on deploying the shuttle service where it can deliver real savings and improvements.

Because one thing has become clear: on-demand shuttles are paving the way for all the technologies yet to come, whether it be autonomous driving, new taxi services, or innovative propulsion technologies. Only those who invest in future-proof technologies will be able to continue playing a key role in the transportation mix.