Far from being a new technology, on-demand transit (ODT) is one of the transport solutions that communities in Iowa are exploring to connect people with opportunities. A paper led by Blake Carel, an SPPA Undergraduate-to-Graduate (U2G) student supervised by Professor Bogdan Kapatsila, looked at how Trip Connect, an ODT service in Johnson County, Iowa, integrates into the existing transit ecosystem.

The research team found that a significant portion of on-demand trips originated and ended within the walking distance of existing fixed transit routes, though our modeling suggested that only about a fifth of Trip Connect trips could have been completed using the fixed transit service in less than an hour. The trips that could have been completed using fixed routes would still have been about four times longer, on average. The findings informed the future service planning and outreach efforts of Johnson County. The paper, “Assessing the Benefits of On-demand Transit Service in a Small US Urban Region” is published in the journal Findings.