Designing and testing microtransit routes to improve social inclusion: A pilot study in a suburban area

Suburbs are often characterized by a scarcity of mobility options to access services. Introducing microtransit is a promising way to improve public transport in suburbs, ensuring greater social inclusion and connecting isolated areas to main transit hubs. The paper aims to develop a multi-step GIS-based methodology for designing semi-flexible stop-based microtransit, having fixed routes and flexible routes (detours) and operating with real-time ride bookings (zero lead time). We considered a suburban area in Palermo, Italy, as study area. The identification of fixed and flexible routes was based on the forecasted passenger flows, through the estimate and the assignment of the daily origin-destination matrix for microtransit, also considering safety, spatial, and technical constraints. A small-scale pilot was carried out between November and December 2022 to test microtransit routes and the reliability of a mobile application to operate the service. A customer satisfaction and a willingness-to-pay survey were addressed to the users. The small-scale pilot showed that microtransit could improve public transportation in suburbs, being more accessible and reducing waiting times at stops. Particularly, the result of the design process led to a semi-flexible service accessible by 90 % of the resident population and with waiting times of less than 15 min in 76 % of the rides, lower than those currently experienced by bus users (20 min).