Integrating dial-a-ride and ridesharing services in Curitiba’s Public Transport Network (RIT)

Demand Responsive Transport is regarded allegedly by many as the future of public transportation. Nevertheless, recent study shows that more than a half of DRT services provided by start-ups fail within their first 7 years of operation. Curitiba as a leader in urban planning and the precursor of BRT is constantly exploring new concepts in urban innovative transportation concepts. This project is part of the “Curitiba Smart City Concepts” and focuses on modelling DRT services and assessing their potentiality to reduce car ridership and replace existing feeder lines inside a study area with low public transport ridership. Using PTV Visum 2022 and analytical expressions, three scenarios have been coded and compared to a base scenario. Scenario I introduces ridesharing services inside the area of study. Scenario II features dial-a-ride express shuttles between zones of the model. Scenario III focuses on multimodal transport where dial-a-ride services feed the main bus lines inside the zone, and some of the existing feeder lines (50%) are replace by multimodal transport. The comparison of the system costs are based on the operating costs of 16 feeder lines operating in the study area, under this schema, a maximum reduction of total system cost a -13,48% relative difference in total system costs by scenario III. Subsequently, scenario II achieves to reduce the total system cost by -6.04%. The average of multiple simulations runs suggests that reduction of -1,28% of total system costs is possible by operating a ridesharing fleet of m=35 vehicles with high distribution occupancies. Finally, scenario III not only reduces system costs by almost -13,5%, but also does so by not incrementing the operator cost extremely when compared to DAR of scenario II. Moreover, scenario III reduces by more than 15% the total riding times and mean transfer wait times with public transport inside the area of study. These results show preliminary feasibility for testing the replacement of feeder lines by dial-a-ride service with vehicles of small capacity (C=12-18 pax/veh) in periods of low demand inside the area of study, as well as a call to advocacy for multimodal transport inside the study area