Abstract Manager

In Quebec’s rural areas, small municipalities provide a wide range of public transport services to enable access to destinations of interest for all individuals. Demand-responsive transport (DRT) is an increasingly used public transport service responding to the unique characteristics of these regions: low population density, limited planning and operating resources, and vast territories. DRT services can take multiple forms, but their main distinction from typical public transport services is that they do not operate on a fixed timetable and route.

Accessibility indicators, measuring the ease of reaching destinations, are an effective tool to evaluate the quality of public transport services across a region. These indicators enable to jointly assess transportation systems and land use. However, while planners and decision-makers seek to improve accessibility by public transport in Quebec’s regions, there is little data to measure the impact of the implemented services. Either the data simply does not exist or its format does not allow the generation of accessibility measures using existing approaches and tools. In fact, studies on accessibility indicators have mainly focused on fixed-route services offered by public transport agencies in urban centers. To address these gaps, this study sets out to propose a replicable methodology to calculate accessibility indicators for small municipalities operating DRT services, among others.

First, a framework is developed to characterize and classify the DRT services of small municipalities into four categories: virtual transit lines, zone to transit hub services, zonal DRT, and unstructured services. Second, this framework is used to generate General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) files for services that currently lack them. Using these newly created files, accessibility indicators are then calculated for three categories of destinations (health centers, education, grocery stores) in three administrative regions (Laurentides, Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Centre-du-Québec) of the Quebec province.

Planners and transportation engineers from municipalities in low-density areas can benefit from the proposed methodology, as it provides a better understanding of the quality of current regional public transport services across the territory, and supports the implementation of technological solutions that foster the use of public transport.