Buses or vans without a fixed route, summoned by app or assembled from grouped requests — coverage bought at a high cost per rider.
🤖 This definition was generated with AI from the sources linked throughout. It has not had a complete human review — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources. How this works.
Demand-responsive transit replaces the timetable with a request. A rider hails a shared van by app or phone and the routing is computed from whoever else is going the same way, usually inside a defined zone rather than along a line. Cities reach for it where a fixed route cannot fill a bus: thin suburbs, late nights, the gap between a neighbourhood and the nearest station.
The economics are the story. Los Angeles put its own cost near $42 a boarding against roughly $8 on the bus, and it took a fare rise and contracting operations out to push that towards the promised figure. Nanjing inverts the model: riders propose a line, and the operator runs it only once at least sixty people have joined the group buy and paid — stated interest filtered into revealed demand before a bus moves.
Read the totals per route, not in aggregate. Nanjing's roughly 12,000 daily riders across 350 routes is about thirty-four people per route per day. Demand-responsive services do their work in the gaps; they are not a substitute for throughput, and their subsidy per rider stays several times a bus boarding's.
Added 2026-08-20 · Part of the growing Smart City Glossary