Dial-a-Ride As Fresh Now as it was in 1971.

Transport For London awarded Via a contract for a Dial-a-Ride service this week. In my early twenties while at Ford we created the very first Dial-a-Ride European system at Ford of Europe at the Dunton R&D Centre near Basildon, Essex.

Not many of my network know that whilst at Ford of Europe's Transportation Planning Office, my boss Phil Oxley and I created Europe's first ever Demand Actuated Bus System, called Dial-a-Ride. That was 1971! It was launched at Maidstone, Kent in 1972. This article is written in the context of MAAS in Scotland where I now reside.

Here's a launch shot of the first Dial-a-Ride vehicle. The system went on to be installed in nearly every UK post-war new town starting with Harlow, then Milton Keynes, Basildon and Stevenage. I was working with Phil Oxley to develop Britain’s first MAAS solution based on an algorithm developed by MIT and first used in the field at Ann-Arbor in Michigan. The Dial-a-Ride program was developed by our team working in close collaboration with Marconi Computer Systems, WS Atkins and a number of British bus and taxi operators.?

Objective - The objective was to provide a more personalised bus service which would fit between a conventional taxi and a conventional bus service. ?

Groundwork - The early Dial-a-Ride solutions involved detailed journey time analysis from every local origin, let’s say at the edge of a new town residential neighbourhood to the key destination hubs, such as railway station or town centre. The reason these tortuously timed runs (actually done by me in a transit) were made at different times of the day in order to experience differing traffic volume conditions was because the standard US one-kilometre grid does not apply to the historic village core of Harlow or Stevenage old town. Once all this data was fed into a British version of the algorithm, the wait-time promise and journey time promise could be configured.?

How Dial-a-Ride worked Accessing the service was by way of a free telephone at a bus stop, as in the Maidstone service, or a call from home to a central control interface. Here the trained operator used a Marconi computer-based system to relay the travel wait-time promise.?

Regulatory environment- In each case the service required that we worked within the regulatory environment pertaining to each area. As an example, in the case of the Abingdon trial which began in the spring of 1972, we worked with London Country Bus Services and Oxford Motor Services Ltd., the local National Bus Company subsidiary, which was granted a twelve-month licence for the service by the Southeastern Traffic Commissioners. By the time that the first services were shown to be successful and accepted by the travelling public and the operators, Dial-a-Ride services were introduced in most British new towns including Harlow, Milton Keynes, Basildon, Stevenage and later in Oslo and Kingston, Jamaica.?

Successes and one failure - It’s interesting to note that the UK taxi sector warmed to Dial-a-Ride as a concept. The very first taxi company-operated DAR service began in Maidstone, Kent in 1972 and was operated in conjunction with Ford by Dennis Radio Taxis. While it was good to see cross-modal cooperation between taxi and bus in locations such as Harrogate, where the service was operated by the West Yorkshire Road Car Company, in Scotland this cross-modal activity was not destined to succeed.

In July 1973 an application to the Scottish Traffic Commissioners for a twice-weekly service based in East Kilbride by Ben Thomson Cabs of East Kilbride was successfully opposed by Central SMT. The service proposed was designed to link with railway services at East Kilbride railway station and to go on to the town shopping centre. While British Rail welcomed the proposal, Central SMT, as the established operator of stage services, objected, contending that the group of taxi operators working with Ben Thomson Cabs was seeking to monopolise the East Kilbride taxi trade and would abstract traffic from them. Despite the Commissioners being assured that a wide number of organisations and businesses were supporting the application of Thomson, only the applicant and a principal officer of the planning department of the Development Corporation gave evidence. East Kilbride Town Council favoured this application rather than that of SMT, but then failed to deliver evidence.

I still have relevant press clippings from Commercial Motor dated 6 July 1973 which detail the reasons that this innovative service failed in Scotland while gaining traction across the rest of the UK. Of course, now times have changed, and transport innovation is a priority for the Scottish Government and the transport authorities and operators working with Transport Scotland.

Why Dial-a-Ride is relevant today - The services that we pioneered showed almost 50 years ago the viability of MaaS solutions. The market failing that we were addressing was that of poor access from the periphery of a new town or a market town, such as Maidstone, Harrogate, or Abingdon, to access vital hubs such as transport interchanges, town centres, hospitals, and schools.

In some ways that model is just as relevant today as it was then, except that now we have much better ways of using data within aggregating platforms like Shyft to turn the backbone of the back-office services into a seamless transport solution, the modern vision of MAAS that is evolving now. 50 years ago, there were no smartphones, tablets, or computers as we know them today. However, in the rural areas that we are likely to address there will still be potential travellers who do not have access to these modern tools, either because of age, economic factors or just an unwillingness to embrace them. The lack of digital connectivity in terms of 3, 4 and 5G in remote areas of Scotland will be a barrier to modern app-based solutions, but one which we had already overcome in these early DAR services.

Vehicle choice - Interestingly, the vehicles that were used then – Ford Transit minibuses with special body conversions by Deansgate and Strachan – were very similar to the modern combi vehicles offered today by Ford, Peugeot, and Mercedes with its V-series. The initial services used 15-seater Ford Transits while our modern MAAS solutions could well use smaller eight to twelve-seater purpose-designed vehicles which could later be operated in autonomous mode.?

Key learnings - The important key learnings from these early services were:

● That conventional bus services and taxi operators could work harmoniously where there was mutual goodwill.

● That the travelling public, predominantly women who lacked access to private vehicles at a time when multiple car ownership was rarer than currently, really appreciated door-to-destination services supported by a specific wait-time promise linked to a specific fair price that was known in advance.

● That a personalised service that was safe, reliable, comfortable, and affordable was a positive addition to modal choice.

● That small PSVs could work efficiently, comfortably, and reliably to fill the gap between conventional taxi and bus while reducing traffic volumes.

● Commercially these services were not a success because of the low population volumes in the travel catchment area. With this lesson now learned, future MAAS services will need to build into their business plan innovatory revenue streams, such as charging for Last Mile parcel delivery, advertising revenue for external and internal vehicle surfaces, and even possibly leveraging the PR benefits of nationally recognised brands and companies, such as Amazon or major local employers, sponsoring a service to generate community goodwill.

● Simplicity in price expectation is important to the traveller.

● A maximum wait-time of 20 minutes is acceptable.

● In developing our modern MAAS solution within the priority parameters, for instance, expressed by Transport Scotland and repeated in the MAAS Playbook, city transport operators seek to encourage Active Travel. This means walking and cycling to a pick-up point. However, DAR showed that door-to-destination service is important where there is severe disability, inclement climatic conditions and even where ladies destined for a night out in high heels preferred a doorstep service.