Behavioural response of paratransit to formal public transport in hybrid systems

Paratransit often emerges in the absence of sufficient formal transit. As governments try to catch up and improve the formal transit service offering, their efforts are often undermined by the quick and dynamic response of the paratransit mode. Recent advances in transport modelling, using agent-based simulation, can provide better decision support. It can allow authorities to evaluate both the intended and unintended consequences of their decisions to introduce or change the formal transit. In this paper, we systematically evaluate paratransit’s response to changes in the formal transit and show that paratransit operators capitalise most on long headways of the formal service.