From public mobility on demand to autonomous public mobility on demand – Learning from dial-a-ride services in Germany

The question arises how to satisfy different needs for mobility while at the same time containing traffic, given that future demand for mobility will keep increasing due to urbanization and economic growth. Cities like Oslo, Helsinki, and Madrid have announced their plans to reduce motorized traffic in the next years. Electri-fication, connectivity and automation, as central trends in the upcoming generation of vehicles may not lead to a reduction of traffic but rather increase it. Future mobility is challenged to bundle up traffic demands to handle an increasing mobility demand caused by spatial sprawl, economic growth and flexibilization of work-ing hours. Looking at mobility from a psychological perspective another challenge arises – people strive for a more flexible form of mobility than public mass transport offers. They rather want schedules to adapt to their needs than to plan their mobility regarding to the fixed times of public transport. Demand responsive transport systems offer an opportunity to overcome these challenges for future mobility – both, bundling of demand and flexibility of service. In Germany those dial-a-ride services, called “Anrufbusse” or “Rufbusse”, could serve as a possible guarantor for the preservation of personal mobility, especially in sparsely populated rural areas. Those systems offer public mobility on demand within given temporal and spatial restrictions. Currently, the annual number of passengers of those public on- demand busses is relatively small, especially the amount of deliberate passengers, who decide to use dial-a-ride services despite of other individual mobili-ty options like an own car. Given the hypotheses that dial-a-ride systems are a promising way to handle the challenges of bundling of demand on the one hand and individual flexibility on the other hand also for urban areas, those systems need to be examined more closely. Existing dial-a-ride systems in Germany were ana-lyzed with the aim of identifying factors that influence the use and the success of such systems. Factors were identified by means of an extensive investigation of secondary data as well as interviews with system opera-tors and users. Given the assumption that actual dial-a-ride systems are the antecedents of autonomous public mobility-on-demand systems, like “Robo-Cabs”, this study takes a first step to analyze the predictors of a future efficient and sustainable mobility