The Taw Valley car service was a commercially operated shared hire car scheme designed to fill gaps within an existing public transport network. It offered residents an improved choice of destinations and of days of travel by making feeder connections with existing services, and it offered a local facility. The area was large, and was divided into separate operating zones. Operators were found to be in limited supply, and the scheme was not established in the whole of the designated area. The service operated reliably, but patronage was low. Lifts and direct conventional buses catered for most requirements at the site, leaving only residual scattered demands. Many of the car journeys were for important purposes, such as medical appointments, but most trips would have been made somehow in the absence of the service, and only about one-fifth of trips resulted in an extra bus or train journey. The low demand resulted in little car sharing, poor vehicle utilization, and consequently poor financial performance. During the second phase of the scheme direct revenue covered 13 per cent of total costs, with indirect generated revenue on other services equivalent to roughly a further 6 per cent of costs. (Author/publisher)
Abstract