Dial-a-ride systems are attracting attention as a new style of transportation systems for urban areas. While it has been reported that such systems improve the usability of bus systems when applied in a small town or area, it is not obvious how and under what conditions the systems are effective in comparison to traditional fixed-route bus systems. We conducted two computer simulations of dial-a-ride and fixed-route systems in order to compare the usability and profitability of both systems. Simulation results indicated that: (1) The usability of the dial-a-ride system with a fixed number of buses drops very quickly when the number of requests(demands) increases. (2) When we increase the number of buses proportionally to the number of demand, the usability of the dial-a-ride system is improved more significantly than that of the fixed-route system. (3) When frequency of demands is sufficiently, the dial-a-ride system is a reasonable solution from the both usability and profitability perspectives.
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