Ageing populations in rural areas face acute mobility deprivation as driving cessation and economically unviable public transport leave elderly residents isolated from healthcare and social services. Across Europe, demand-responsive transport (DRT) has been promoted as a solution, yet implementations have repeatedly failed—Helsinki’s Kutsuplus, the UK’s Rural Bus Challenge schemes, and the Netherlands’ Breng flex were all discontinued due to low ridership, unsustainable costs, and weak elderly user acceptance. Research identifies a fundamental “DRT dilemma”: the service quality needed to attract adoption requires subsidization levels governments cannot sustain. We argue this recurring failure stems from an inability to manage perishable service capacity in sparse-demand contexts—a problem we theorize through “service inventory” management. This study examines Taiwan’s TTGO platform in Taitung County, a rural DRT system achieving sustained growth serving predominantly elderly users for medical, rehabilitation, and welfare trips. Drawing on 25 months of operational data (14,461 orders; 23,672 passengers; 157,545 km dispatched), we identify three service inventory mechanisms resolving challenges that defeated European implementations: (1) reservation-based service inventory, shifting capacity management from real-time response to advance scheduling, transforming demand uncertainty into planned allocation; (2) community-relational inventory, embedding service capacity within local driver networks, building the trust elderly users require; and (3) cross-service integration inventory, bundling transport with healthcare and welfare services, increasing per-trip social value and fiscal sustainability. Our findings offer transferable insights for European policymakers designing age-friendly rural mobility, demonstrating how community-embedded, reservation-based models overcome structural barriers that technology-centric approaches have repeatedly failed to address. Keywords: demand-responsive transport, service inventory,

Authors:
Peter Sher, Feng Chia University, Taiwan
Sheng-Tsung Hou, Feng Chia University, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Professor Peter J. Sher is an academic leader and strategist based in Taiwan, currently serving as a Chair Professor at Feng Chia University. He used to work in Ministry of Economic Affairs before joining academics.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-j-sher-2721903a/

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