Demand Responsive Transit

As of v7.6, the Conveyal R5 routing engine handles selected types of demand responsive services. Supported service types include pickup and dropoff at zones specified via locations.geojson or at stops specified via location_groups.txt and location_group_stops.txt. Deviated route services are not currently supported.

To enable supported services that are present in the GTFS feeds of a baseline network bundle, add "ON_DEMAND" to the custom "flags" of an analysis request.

For origins/destinations within pickup/dropoff zones, vehicles can be boarded directly. For points outside such zones, walking/cycling between the points and street intersections within the zones is supported. Similarly, for service defined at specific stops, walking/cycling between those stops and origin/destination points is supported.

On-demand services travel at car speeds, modified by a specified safe_duration_factor in the GTFS feed. Note that car speeds in Conveyal do not account for congestion by default. Pickup waiting time is defined by safe_duration_offset in the GTFS feed.

For checking the temporal availability of services (defined in a GTFS feed by start_pickup_drop_off_window and end_pickup_drop_off_window), R5 assumes journeys start at the midpoint of the analysis departure time window.

R5 currently supports direct trips using these on-demand services, as well as first-mile trips connecting to scheduled transit. Last-mile trips connecting from scheduled transit will be enabled in an upcoming release. In the meantime, last-mile trips are still supported with the previous implementation of Pickup Delay modifications.