Assessing the potential of demand-responsive transportation for sustainable rural mobility through macroscopic travel demand modeling

Kurzfassung

Demand-Responsive Transport (DRT) has the potential to improve accessibility in low-density areas and reduce dependence on private cars. At the same time, considerable uncertainty remains regarding demand, operational requirements, and the economic viability of large-scale services. This dissertation therefore develops a methodology for integrating DRT into macroscopic travel demand models. The approach combines temporal disaggregation of aggregated demand, spatial matching and pooling of trip requests, vehicle dispatching, and the representation of DRT as an additional alternative in mode choice. The methodology is applied to a rural case study in the Main-Rhön region using the German national travel demand model DEMO. The results indicate that a high-quality, area-wide DRT service can generate substantial demand and provide a relevant alternative to private car use, particularly in peripheral areas. At the same time, the case study highlights a fundamental trade-off between service quality and economic efficiency: high availability and short waiting times require considerable operational capacity and are likely to depend on public funding. DRT therefore appears most suitable where conventional fixed-route public transport is inefficient due to low demand and dispersed settlement structures. The proposed methodology enables these potentials and trade-offs to be assessed systematically in large-scale applications.