Addressing the public transport ridership/coverage dilemma in small cities: A spatial approach

This paper presents a spatial approach to support the design of new on-demand flexible transport services in urban areas, characterized by inefficient public transport and modal imbalance in favour of private cars. These services, enabled by new technologies and inspired by the shared mobility paradigm, can complement and improve conventional public transport and reduce car use. The methodology was applied to Acireale, a small town in Southern Italy. A redesign of the existing bus network and its integration with a flexible service was formulated. A scenario analysis was carried out by the evaluation of a simple accessibility measure; the computation of the Gini coefficient was performed to measure the social equity of different scenarios. Results show an increase in equity with a lower coverage of traditional lines and the introduction of the on-demand service. This approach based on easy-to-understand indicators can help the strategic planning of such services, which have the potential to find a trade-off between ridership and coverage as both desirable and conflicting goals in public transport planning.