Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) Guidance for Transport Authorities and Operators

Key takeaways: What decision-makers need to know about demand responsive transport (DRT)

From my 18 years of experience, one pattern I see repeatedly is that demand responsive transport gets either oversold as a cure-all or dismissed as too complicated to be worth the effort. Neither position serves the authorities and operators who are trying to make practical decisions with limited budgets and real accountability. This guidance draws on work at Surbon Consulting across bus, rail, micromobility and DRT schemes, and is written to give decision-makers an honest, usable account of what demand responsive transport is, when it works, and how to deliver it well.

Demand responsive transport is flexible, shared transport that adjusts to passenger requests rather than following a fixed route and timetable. It typically operates within a defined zone or corridor, takes bookings through an app, website or call centre, and dispatches vehicles to pick up and drop off passengers at agreed times or within agreed windows. It is not a replacement for bus or rail. It is a complement, most effective where fixed route services cannot generate sufficient patronage to be viable, including rural areas, low-demand time periods and first or last mile connections to main corridors.

From Surbon Consulting’s perspective, DRT is a strategic tool. Transport Authorities and operators can use it to address accessibility gaps, support decarbonisation commitments and demonstrate social value in places where a conventional bus would lose money from its first week of operation. That strategic framing matters because it sets the right expectations internally, with funders, and with communities.

The UK evidence is accumulating. Gloucestershire’s Robin, Buckinghamshire’s Pick Me Up and East Sussex Flexibus have each shown, in different ways, that DRT can attract sustainable ridership and deliver measurable outcomes when it is designed around clear objectives, funded realistically, built on good data and operated through strong partnerships. East Sussex Flexibus achieved a benefit-cost ratio of 3.02, a figure that justifies meaningful subsidy when set against the alternatives. These are not outliers produced by ideal conditions. They are the result of deliberate planning choices that this article will walk through.

Authorities should treat DRT as an evolving network asset, not a fixed installation. The right approach is to design, procure, launch and then continuously review performance, with a clear view of when DRT should feed into fixed route services, when it should expand, and when it has served its purpose. Surbon Consulting supports UK and Middle East authorities and operators at every stage of this cycle: DRT strategy, bid writing, procurement, mobilisation and performance improvement.

Why demand responsive transport is back on the agenda in 2026

Demand responsive transport has attracted a significant increase in attention from local transport authorities, combined authorities and operators since 2021. Several factors have converged to drive this. The Department for Transport’s Rural Mobility Fund (RMF), which ran trials across England between 2021 and 2025, produced a substantial body of evidence on what works in low-density areas. Those trials tested different operating models, booking approaches and technology platforms, and the lessons are now informing a new generation of schemes. Alongside this, the Bus Services Act 2025 has changed the landscape for bus network governance, strengthening the tools available to authorities through enhanced partnerships and franchising, and prompting many to reconsider where flexible services fit within their overall networks. Where fixed route bus networks are being redesigned under new regulatory frameworks, DRT is increasingly being considered as part of the solution rather than an afterthought.

At the same time, funding pressures on supported bus services have not eased. Many English authorities are still managing reductions to their supported bus budgets, and the search for more efficient ways to maintain connectivity in rural and peri-urban areas continues. Demand responsive transport, when well designed, offers the potential to serve more passengers per vehicle mile than an underloaded conventional bus, particularly in the evening or on routes where demand is geographically dispersed. That efficiency argument is not automatic, and it depends heavily on good service design, appropriate technology and realistic expectations about uptake timelines. But it is real, and it is part of why DRT has moved from a niche interest to a mainstream planning consideration in the 2024 to 2026 period.

This article is written for senior decision-makers: heads of transport planning and commissioning in local transport authorities and combined authorities, bid managers and commercial directors at bus and DRT operators, and procurement leads responsible for bringing new flexible transport services to market. It assumes familiarity with the basics of public transport commissioning and is not an introductory guide for general audiences.

The focus throughout is practical and business-focused. This means network design, business case development, procurement structure, contract management and integration with wider transport services. The questions are the ones senior practitioners are actually trying to answer: how do I know if DRT is right for this area, how long will it take to procure, what should I specify in the contract, and how do I know if it is working?Surbon Consulting works across bus, rail, metro, ferry and micromobility in the UK and the Middle East. We have supported authorities and operators on DRT at multiple stages: options appraisal, demand forecasting, procurement specification, mobilisation oversight and performance review. Some of the examples in this article draw on that project experience. Where specific figures or outcomes are cited, they relate to published scheme data or assessments available in the public domain.

What is demand responsive transport (DRT)?

Demand responsive transport is a flexible transport service that adjusts its routes and schedules in response to passenger requests, rather than operating a fixed route with a published timetable. Bookings are made in advance or close to the time of travel through an app, website or telephone call centre, and the system uses optimisation software to assign vehicles to trips, sequence pick-ups and drop-offs, and calculate arrival windows. The key distinction from a conventional bus is that the path a vehicle takes on any given day is determined by who has booked and where they need to go, not by a predetermined schedule.

That basic definition covers a wide range of operating models, and it is worth being clear about the differences, because they have meaningful implications for procurement, regulation and passenger experience.

Traditional dial-a-ride services, which many councils have operated for decades, are pre-booked, often require 24 or 48 hours notice, and are frequently targeted at older or disabled passengers. They are valuable but limited in scope. Semi-flexible bus routes represent a middle ground: they may have some fixed stops and anchor timepoints (for example, departing a market town at 09:15 and arriving at a hospital campus by 10:00) but allow the vehicle to deviate from the direct path within certain parameters to serve additional pick-up requests. Fully dynamic on-demand services operate within a defined zone or corridor with no fixed route at all, routing vehicles entirely in response to demand as it materialises. Modern “digital DRT” schemes, sometimes referred to as DDRT, belong in this last category and are what most authorities mean when they use the term today.

The operating models in use across the UK typically fall into three broad types. 

1. Shared accessible minibuses, registered as flexible bus services under the Transport Act 1985 and relevant secondary legislation, are the most common form in publicly funded rural schemes. 
2. Shared taxis or private hire vehicles (PHVs) are used in very low-density areas where the road network does not suit larger vehicles or where demand volumes would not justify a PSV. 
3. Hybrid models combine dedicated DRT capacity with other transport functions, most often school or non-emergency patient transport, using vehicles that serve multiple purposes across the day to improve cost efficiency.

The digital infrastructure underpinning modern DRT is substantial and is what separates current schemes from earlier iterations. A functional DDRT system requires 

• a customer-facing booking interface (app and web), 
• a call centre module for telephone bookings, 
• an optimisation engine that dynamically calculates the most efficient vehicle routings in real time, 
• a driver app with turn-by-turn navigation and trip management, 
• fleet telematics, and
• payment processing integrated with fare products and concessionary schemes.

The quality and reliability of this software stack has a direct effect on service performance, and choosing the right platform is one of the most consequential decisions an authority will make. Phone-only schemes that rely on manual dispatching still exist and can be appropriate for very small, low-frequency operations, but they scale poorly and generate limited data.

Several terms appear consistently in DRT procurement and planning discussions and are worth defining precisely. 

“On demand” refers to trips requested in real time or close to the time of travel, typically within 30 to 60 minutes of the desired departure. 

“Pre-booking” refers to trips requested further in advance, often the day before or earlier, which allows better aggregation of trips onto vehicles but reduces spontaneity. 

“Aggregation” describes the process of combining multiple bookings into shared trips on the same vehicle, which is the mechanism through which DRT achieves efficiency over single-occupancy journeys. 

“Zoning” defines the geographic boundary within which the service operates. 

“Pick-up points” or “virtual stops” are predefined locations where passengers can be collected, as opposed to door-to-door pick-up. Under current GB regulations, services operating as flexible bus services must comply with specific rules on maximum deviation distances and registration requirements, and these constraints shape what is operationally possible.

Are autonomous vehicles relevant yet?

This article does not cover fully autonomous vehicles in depth. Several trials are under way in the UK, and the regulatory environment is developing, but autonomous DRT is not yet available for mainstream commercial deployment and is not the basis for the procurement and operational decisions most authorities will be making in the near term. Readers interested in that area should refer to the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles.

Why consider DRT? Strategic role alongside fixed route services

DRT is not a universal answer to bus network gaps, and treating it as one is a reliable way to spend money without solving the underlying problem. It is a targeted tool, appropriate in specific circumstances, and its value depends on understanding where those circumstances apply and where they do not.

The core use case is serving areas or time periods where demand is too low or too geographically dispersed to support a viable fixed route. This includes rural villages and small settlements that generate insufficient patronage for a daily bus service, evening and weekend operations where demand on a fixed route would not cover vehicle costs, first and last mile connections between lower-density residential areas and rail stations or main bus corridors, and access to specific destinations that generate irregular or appointment-based demand, such as hospitals, further education colleges and business parks. In each of these contexts, the economics of a conventional scheduled bus are unfavourable, and DRT can provide connectivity at a lower cost per passenger trip.

For authorities, the benefits extend beyond cost efficiency. Improved accessibility and social inclusion are central to the case for rural DRT: older residents without car access, people with disabilities, young people in villages with no local employment, and shift workers whose hours do not align with commercial bus timetables are all groups who gain meaningfully from flexible transport options. 

UK research shows consistent evidence from NHS and social care partners that missed appointments at hospitals and health centres are correlated with poor transport access, and DRT schemes that serve rural catchments around hospital sites have reduced that problem. Rural economic access, enabling people to reach employment, training and retail without a car, is a further benefit that appears in business cases and social value assessments, and is increasingly relevant to local authorities with rural economic development responsibilities.

On decarbonisation, the argument for DRT needs to be made carefully rather than assumed. Replacing a bus that was running near-empty with a shared minibus that carries four or five passengers per trip does reduce emissions per passenger kilometre. Replacing private car journeys with shared DRT trips reduces them further. But where DRT generates entirely new trips that would not otherwise have happened, or where poor aggregation means vehicles are running with one passenger at a time, the carbon case weakens. Authorities should be specific in their business cases about the modal shift assumptions underlying any carbon benefit claim, and use realistic aggregation forecasts rather than optimistic ones.

Two UK examples illustrate what good looks like in practice.

1. Gloucestershire’s Robin service, operated by Arriva in partnership with Gloucestershire County Council, connects villages across rural Gloucestershire to fixed route bus services, rail stations and key destinations. It has progressively expanded its zone coverage since launch, and its ridership growth over successive operating periods demonstrates that demand in rural areas is real but takes time to build as awareness grows and booking habits develop. 
2. Buckinghamshire’s Pick Me Up service, serving the High Wycombe area, addressed a different challenge: access across urban fringes and peri-urban areas where the fixed route network had gaps, particularly at times of day when conventional services were infrequent. Both schemes have required sustained subsidy, but their outcomes in terms of ridership and passenger satisfaction have justified continued investment by their respective authorities.

East Sussex Flexibus provides the most publicly available quantitative case, having been subject to a formal evaluation that produced a benefit-cost ratio (BCR) of 3.02. That figure reflects the total social value generated, including transport user benefits, wider economic benefits and carbon benefits, relative to the public cost of operating the service. A BCR above 2.0 is generally considered good value under HM Treasury’s Green Book framework, and 3.02 places Flexibus comfortably in the range that justifies continued funding. The scheme operated across multiple zones in East Sussex, including rural catchments and coastal communities, and demonstrated that careful zone design and realistic service standards can produce strong outcomes even in challenging geographies.

There are genuine risks and limitations that authorities should acknowledge rather than minimise. Financial sustainability is the most pressing. Virtually all rural DRT schemes in England operate with ongoing subsidy, and most are not on a trajectory to commercial viability. The question is not whether subsidy is required but whether it represents good value relative to alternatives, and what happens when grant funding ends. Many schemes established under the Rural Mobility Fund faced this question as the programme approached its 2025 conclusion, and those that had not secured ongoing revenue funding faced difficult decisions about continuation. Authorities entering into DRT should plan from the outset for what the service will cost once start-up grant funding has been exhausted, and should build that projection into their financial cases.

There is also a passenger confusion risk when DRT is not well integrated with the wider network. If passengers cannot understand how a DRT service connects to the buses and trains they already use, uptake will be lower and the aggregation benefits that justify the investment will not materialise. This is an argument for careful attention to branding, information design and journey planning integration, which are covered in later sections of this article.

From a bid strategy perspective, DRT has become a meaningful differentiator in franchised and enhanced partnership environments. Bidders who can demonstrate a coherent approach to flexible transport, with specific proposals for how DRT would be deployed alongside fixed route services to improve coverage and social value outcomes, are increasingly competitive.

Planning and designing a DRT service

The planning phase is where DRT schemes succeed or fail, and the most common mistake is underestimating how long it takes to do it properly. Based on experience from English Rural Mobility Fund projects, authorities should allow at least nine to twelve months from initial feasibility work to public launch. It reflects the genuine complexity of defining the right service model, building an evidence base, securing funding, running a compliant procurement process and mobilising a contract that works from day one. Schemes that have tried to compress this timeline, particularly the procurement and mobilisation phases, have generally launched with unresolved technical or operational issues that damaged early passenger experience and took months to correct.

The planning process follows a logical sequence of decisions, each of which shapes the next. The sections below work through that sequence: defining the challenge, setting objectives, designing the zone and service model, determining funding, and deciding on the booking model.

Identifying the transport challenge and target users

The starting point is a clear problem statement, not a technology choice. Authorities that begin by deciding they want to run an app-based DRT service and then look for a problem to solve with it tend to produce poorly targeted schemes with weak evidence bases. The question to answer first is: what specific transport challenge are we trying to address, and for whom?

Useful problem statements are geographically specific and user-specific. “There is no evening service from Chipping Campden to Moreton-in-Marsh after 18:30, which leaves shift workers at the retail park without any public transport option” is a problem statement that can be designed around. “Rural transport connectivity is poor” is not, because it cannot be tested, cannot be targeted and will not produce a coherent service specification.

Segmenting the target user population matters for both design and evaluation. Older residents without car access have different booking preferences (telephone over app, more lead time, door-to-door rather than virtual stop) than students or young workers, who are more likely to use mobile booking and require later evening coverage. People with disabilities may require vehicles with specific accessibility features and additional driver support. Shift workers may need very early morning or late night coverage that standard services do not provide. Identifying which groups the scheme is primarily serving shapes every subsequent decision about service hours, booking model, vehicle type and marketing approach.

Before designing anything, authorities should map what already exists. Commercial bus services, supported bus routes, community transport operations under Section 19 or Section 22 permits, non-emergency patient transport, school transport and licensed taxi services all represent existing provision that may partially address the identified need. The objective is to fill genuine gaps, not to duplicate or undermine what is already working. In some areas, the right answer after this mapping exercise is not a new DRT scheme but better integration of existing community transport with the mainstream network. Being willing to reach that conclusion is a sign of good planning, not a failure of ambition.

There are contexts where DRT is unlikely to be the right tool. Dense urban corridors with high-frequency fixed route services are the clearest example: a bus running every ten minutes along a main road generates the frequency and simplicity that passengers value, and a DRT service competing in the same corridor would have worse aggregation, higher complexity and no meaningful advantage over the existing service. DRT in urban contexts is most appropriate for the times and places where those high-frequency services are absent, as covered in the FAQ section later in this article.Stakeholder engagement at this stage is valuable and often underdone. Health boards and NHS trust estates teams understand the appointment patterns and transport barriers that affect their patient populations. Schools, colleges and further education providers know when and where students are travelling. Major employers, particularly those with shift patterns that fall outside conventional transport hours, can quantify their staff’s transport challenges. Parish and town councils carry detailed local knowledge about which villages are most isolated and which informal transport arrangements currently exist. Community transport operators know the demand that they are already seeing and cannot fully meet. Engaging all of these groups before settling on a service concept produces a much stronger evidence base and builds the partnerships that will be needed to support the scheme once it launches, much of which can be done online.

Setting clear aims, KPIs and service standards

Once the problem is defined and the target users are understood, the next task is to set clear objectives and translate them into measurable performance standards. Three to six specific, measurable objectives are the right number. Fewer than three tends to mean important dimensions of performance are not being monitored. More than six tends to mean the scheme is trying to be all things to all people and has not made the difficult prioritisation choices that good design requires.

Objectives should be grounded in the problem statement and should be testable against data the scheme will actually generate. Examples of well-formed objectives include: 

• increase public transport trips in a defined rural area by a specified percentage by a specified year; 
• reduce the proportion of missed outpatient appointments at a named hospital attributable to transport barriers, measured against baseline data from the trust; 
• maintain subsidy per passenger trip below a defined threshold after the second year of operation. 

Each of these can be measured, each is tied to a genuine policy goal and each provides a basis for contract performance management.

A balanced KPI set should cover ridership (total trips and trips per vehicle hour), coverage (the proportion of the target population living within a defined distance of a pick-up point), reliability (the percentage of pick-ups arriving within the agreed time window), customer satisfaction (collected through post-journey surveys or in-app ratings) and social value (measured through specific proxy indicators agreed with the authority). The exact metrics should be chosen at the design stage, written into the contract specification and agreed with the operator before launch, so that data collection processes are in place from day one.

Some objectives, particularly those related to social inclusion and health access, will justify subsidy levels that would not be acceptable for purely commercial or efficiency-driven services. This should be explicit in political and business case discussions, not buried in the assumptions. Elected members and senior officers need to understand that a rural DRT service serving older residents without cars will cost more per passenger trip than a busy urban bus, and that this is an acceptable outcome if the social value delivered is proportionate to the cost. Making that argument clearly at the outset, with reference to comparable schemes and published BCR evidence, is more effective than discovering the conversation late when subsidy levels attract political scrutiny and there is a scrabbling to justify decisions.

Service standards define the passenger experience commitments that the operator is required to meet. These should include the maximum waiting time from booking confirmation to pick-up (typically expressed as a window, such as within twenty minutes of the requested time), the maximum journey extension caused by sharing with other passengers, the minimum notice required to cancel a booking without charge, and the minimum accessibility standard for vehicles and customer interfaces. These commitments should be realistic: standards set too tightly will result in the operator struggling to comply and distorting their routing to meet time targets at the expense of aggregation. Standards set too loosely will produce a service that passengers find unreliable and stop using.

Surbon Consulting can help authorities derive KPI frameworks that align with Department for Transport guidance on bus service monitoring, local transport plan objectives and, for Middle East clients, national vision strategies that set specific targets for public transport mode share and accessibility.

Designing zones, routes and operating patterns

The geographic design of a DRT service is one of the most consequential decisions in the planning process, and it is where some of the most common and costly mistakes are made.

The fundamental choice is between a zone-based model, where all trips must start and end within a defined geographic area, and a corridor or feeder model, where the service connects a dispersed catchment to a specific set of destinations such as a rail station or hospital. Zone-based models offer more flexibility and can serve a wider range of trip types, but they require sufficient demand density to achieve good aggregation. Corridor models are more constrained but can be more efficient where demand is genuinely focused on specific origin and destination pairs.

Zone sizing requires careful judgement. Zones that are too large spread demand too thinly, produce long vehicle routing distances and result in poor aggregation and long passenger journey times. Zones that are too small may exclude significant demand and require passengers to make complex transfers to access the service. The starting point for zone design should be real travel pattern data: census origin-destination data, previous bus ticketing records, mobile location data where available, and the input gathered from health, education and employment stakeholders in the problem definition phase. East Sussex Flexibus began with a multi-zone approach across the county, tested those zones against observed demand patterns, and subsequently consolidated and adjusted boundaries to reflect where demand was strongest and where journey length constraints improved aggregation. That iterative approach, starting with evidence-based design and refining based on performance data, is the right model.

The choice between door-to-door service and pick-up at virtual stops involves a genuine trade-off. 

Door-to-door service is more accessible and easier for passengers to understand, but it increases vehicle routing distances and reduces aggregation efficiency because vehicles must travel to each passenger’s precise address and is more expensive in fuel terms. 

Virtual stops or designated pick-up points reduce routing distances, improve aggregation and simplify the driver’s navigation task, but require passengers to reach the pick-up point, which may be a barrier for older or disabled users. 

Many schemes use a hybrid approach, offering door-to-door for passengers with a declared accessibility need and virtual stop pick-up as the default for other passengers. This is a defensible balance, but it requires the booking system to support different service levels and the operator to train drivers accordingly.

Operating hours should reflect the actual demand patterns identified in the problem definition phase, not conventional assumptions about when public transport runs. Many rural DRT schemes focus on the early morning and daytime period because that is when community transport volumes are highest, but if the identified problem is evening access for shift workers or young people, the service hours must reflect that need. Typical rural DRT operating hours in current English schemes run from around 06:00 to 22:00 Monday to Saturday, with reduced or no operation on Sundays. Schools and colleges generate distinct morning and afternoon peaks that can be valuable for vehicle utilisation, but schemes that allow school transport to dominate capacity risk excluding general public passengers during peak times, which undermines patronage growth. Building clear capacity allocation rules into the contract specification avoids this problem.

Interchange with fixed routes should be designed in, not assumed. Where the DRT service is intended to feed passengers onto a trunk bus or rail service, the timetable of that connection matters. A rural DRT service that arrives at a market town with a fifteen-minute gap before the next connecting bus is more useful than one that arrives with a five-minute gap that is rarely achievable in practice. Specifying timed connections at key interchange points and monitoring adherence to those connections as part of the KPI framework gives both authority and operator the information needed to keep the integrated offer working.

Funding, fares and long‑term financial sustainability

In England, the public funding sources for DRT are familiar to anyone who has commissioned supported transport. Local authority revenue support budgets carry the recurring cost. Rural Mobility Fund-style grants and Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) allocations have funded most of the schemes launched since 2021. Developer contributions secured through Section 106 agreements can support services in growth areas, and contributions from health or education partners are possible where the scheme directly serves their users, although these are harder to secure and rarely cover the full cost.

The distinction that matters most is between start-up funding and ongoing operating subsidy. Start-up funding covers vehicles, software licensing, marketing and mobilisation, and it is usually the easier money to find because grant programmes like the Rural Mobility Fund were designed around it. Operating subsidy is the recurring cost of running the service once it is live, and it is where schemes get into trouble. Many Rural Mobility Fund services reached 2025/26 with their start-up grant exhausted and no committed revenue stream to replace it. Plan from day one for what the service costs to run after the grant ends, and put that figure in front of decision-makers before launch, not eighteen months later when the funding cliff arrives.

On fares, simple beats clever. A flat fare that passengers can understand without checking an app does more for uptake than a distance-based structure that is theoretically fairer but discourages spontaneous use. Concessionary passes should be accepted on the same basis as the local bus network, because a DRT service that does not honour an older passenger’s bus pass will struggle to serve the very group it is often designed for. Where possible, integrate fares and capping with existing ticketing so a DRT trip counts towards the same daily cap as the connecting bus or train.

Introductory promotions help in the early months when the job is to build booking habits rather than maximise revenue. A first ride free, or discounted multi-rider tickets, can move people over the initial hurdle of trying something unfamiliar. Set a clear end date so the promotion does not quietly become the permanent fare and undermine the subsidy case later.

Surbon Consulting models demand and pricing scenarios so clients can see the trade-off between fare level, subsidy and service quality before they commit. The aim is a combination that is sustainable past the grant period, not one that looks affordable on day one and unravels in year three.

The Middle East context

In the Gulf, the funding picture is different. DRT and flexible services are typically funded directly by the transport authority or the relevant government body, often as part of a wider mobility programme tied to a national vision strategy. In the UAE, the RTA in Dubai and equivalent authorities in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah commission services centrally; in Saudi Arabia, schemes sit within the broader public transport investment driven by Vision 2030 and the work of regional transport authorities. The grant-and-cliff problem that shapes English rural DRT is less acute, because funding is rarely structured as a time-limited trial. The challenge instead is demonstrating value for money and ridership within programmes where the alternative call on the budget is high-profile metro and BRT investment. The fare and aggregation principles are the same; the funding governance is not.

On demand vs pre booking models

Booking models sit on a spectrum. At one end, real-time on-demand booking lets a passenger request a trip 30 to 60 minutes before they want to travel, sometimes less. At the other, pre-booking requires 24 hours or more notice. Most schemes land somewhere in between, and the right point depends on demand density, vehicle availability and the type of passenger the service is for.

The trade-off is straightforward. Real-time booking is what passengers want, because it feels like a taxi rather than a timetable, but it is harder to run efficiently. The system cannot aggregate trips it does not yet know about, so it either holds vehicles in reserve or accepts that some trips run with one passenger. That means more vehicles, tighter zones or both. Pre-booking gives the optimisation engine the full picture of demand before the day starts, which produces much better aggregation and lower cost per trip, but it asks passengers to plan ahead, and a service that feels rigid attracts fewer of the spontaneous trips that build patronage.

Existing schemes show how the choice tracks demand. Buckinghamshire’s Pick Me Up, operating in a relatively dense area around High Wycombe, can sustain same-day and short-notice booking because there is enough demand to fill shared trips. More dispersed, low-density rural areas often default to next-day booking, because real-time routing across a large zone with thin demand produces long, expensive, near-empty journeys. Match the model to the geography rather than to what sounds most modern.

No-shows are the quiet killer of pre-booked DRT. A vehicle dispatched to collect a passenger who does not appear has burned capacity that could have served someone else, and rural schemes with no-show rates above ten per cent see their economics deteriorate fast. The usual levers are payment at the time of booking, a clear cancellation cut-off, and a modest no-show charge where it is legally and politically acceptable. Charges need careful handling: applied bluntly they can deter the vulnerable passengers a scheme exists to serve, so most authorities reserve them for repeat offenders and waive them for first occurrences and genuine emergencies.

Whatever booking model is chosen, offer app, web and call centre channels from launch. A scheme that is app-only excludes the older and digitally-excluded passengers who often have the greatest need, and retrofitting a call centre after launch is more expensive and slower than building it in. Set a clear service standard for each channel, including call answer times, so the telephone route is not treated as a poor relation to the app.

Procurement, contracting and technology choices

Procuring a DRT service is not the same as commissioning a fixed route bus contract, and authorities that treat it as one tend to write specifications that miss the things that matter. A fixed route contract buys vehicle hours against a published timetable. A DRT contract buys an operation, a software platform, a booking and payment system, and a data flow, all of which have to work together from day one. The software and data dimensions are where most of the unfamiliar risk sits, and they need as much attention in the procurement as the vehicles and drivers.

The first structural decision is whether to buy a fully integrated service from a single prime contractor or to split it into separate lots for operations, software, vehicles and customer support. Each route has consequences for cost, continuity and control that are worth working through before the tender is drafted, and the sections below take packaging, technology, vehicles and drivers, and data and partnership in turn.

Surbon Consulting supports authorities and operators through the full procurement cycle: drafting the specification, setting evaluation criteria and scoring matrices that attract good bids and comply with the Procurement Act 2023, assessing submissions, and overseeing mobilisation so the contract that was awarded is the contract that goes live.

Packaging the DRT service: single vs multiple lots

The single-lot model puts one supplier in charge of vehicles, drivers, software and often customer support under a single contract. Its appeal is simplicity: one contract to manage, one point of accountability, one mobilisation. For a smaller authority or a first DRT scheme, that simplicity is worth a lot, and the integration risk sits with the supplier rather than the authority. The cost is dependence. When the contract ends, the authority may find that the booking platform, the passenger accounts and the historic data all belong to a supplier who is now a competitor in the re-tender, which weakens the authority’s hand and can disrupt passengers at transition.

Modular procurement separates the software from the operations, and sometimes the vehicles too. The authority contracts the digital platform on a longer term and lets the operating contract run on its own cycle, so a change of operator does not mean a change of app, passenger accounts or data history. This protects continuity and competition, but it puts the integration risk back on the authority, who now has to make two or three suppliers work together and owns the gaps when they do not. It suits authorities with the commercial capacity to manage that complexity.

Mixed and shared models are increasingly common. Neighbouring authorities can jointly procure a single software platform and call centre while running their own operations, which spreads the fixed cost of the technology and gives passengers a consistent offer across boundaries. Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire have shared digital and call centre infrastructure on this basis while keeping operations separate. For two authorities with adjacent rural areas, this is often the most efficient structure available.

Contract lengths need to line up with the assets and cycles around them. Software contracts, operating contracts, vehicle leasing or depreciation periods, and the wider franchise or enhanced partnership review dates should be aligned so the authority is not forced to re-procure one element in isolation at an awkward moment. Build in the flexibility to adjust zones, hours and fares without triggering a full re-procurement, within what the Procurement Act 2023 allows, because a DRT service that cannot change its zone boundaries for five years is a service that cannot respond to its own performance data.

Selecting software and technology for responsive transport

The software is the part of a DRT scheme that authorities understand least and that determines performance most. A functional platform has to deliver a customer booking interface across app and web, call centre booking tools, an optimisation engine that routes and schedules vehicles in real time, a driver app, reporting, and integration with payment systems. Weakness in any one of these shows up directly in the passenger experience, and the optimisation engine in particular is what separates a platform that aggregates trips efficiently from one that runs vehicles half-empty.

Evaluate on the things that matter in live operation rather than on demo polish. Reliability and uptime, because a booking system that is down on a wet Tuesday morning loses passengers permanently. User experience and accessibility, including how the interface works for older passengers and screen reader users. Configurability, so business rules like zone boundaries, time windows and fare structures can be changed by the authority or operator without a chargeable software development request every time. API availability, so the platform can talk to other systems. And the vendor’s support responsiveness, which you can only really judge by talking to their existing authority customers rather than reading the sales material.

Interoperability with national and local systems is a practical requirement, not a nice-to-have. The platform should publish to the Bus Open Data Service (BODS) where the service is registered, work with GTFS and TransXChange formats, feed journey planners so passengers find the service when they search for a trip, and integrate with any Mobility-as-a-Service platform the area operates. A DRT service that does not appear in the journey planners passengers already use is a service most of them will never discover.

On payments, the system needs to handle integration with a payment service provider such as GOV.UK Pay or a commercial gateway, card-on-file for quick repeat booking, and support for concessions, multi-trip tickets and any corporate or institutional accounts. Concessionary handling deserves particular scrutiny, because a platform that cannot process an older person’s bus pass cleanly will fail the passengers who use the service most.

Before the formal tender, run a structured market engagement phase. A prior information notice, market engagement days and technical questionnaires let authorities understand what the market can actually deliver and refine the specification accordingly. The alternative, writing the specification in isolation and discovering at tender stage that no supplier can meet it, wastes everyone’s time and produces weaker bids.

Vehicles, licensing and driver requirements

Vehicle choice follows demand density and road geometry. Accessible minibuses of roughly 8 to 16 seats, operating as PSVs, are the workhorse of publicly funded rural DRT. Larger accessible buses make sense in higher-demand suburban zones where trips aggregate well. In very low-density areas with narrow lanes where a minibus cannot operate or would rarely fill, licensed taxis or private hire vehicles are often the only practical option, and many schemes use a mix across their zones.

Whether the authority or the operator owns the fleet is a real decision with real consequences. Authority-owned vehicles give control over specification and the ability to redeploy assets between services or operators, which protects continuity at re-tender. The cost is the capital outlay and the asset risk, including the residual value of specialist accessible vehicles that are harder to sell on. Operator-owned fleets shift that risk and cost to the supplier, but tie the vehicles to the operating contract, so a change of operator can mean a change of fleet. There is no universally right answer; it depends on the authority’s appetite for capital risk and how much continuity matters in the local market.

Licensing is more involved than for a conventional bus. Services run as flexible bus services need local service registration and the operator needs the appropriate operator licence. Community transport delivered under Section 19 or Section 22 permits sits within its own legal framework, with limits on what it can do commercially. Where PHVs are used, they operate under private hire licensing rather than PSV rules, which constrains how trips can be shared and advertised. Getting the licensing basis right at the design stage avoids unpleasant surprises at mobilisation.

Accessibility has to be designed in physically and operationally. That means wheelchair access and boarding aids, priority seating, and information in formats that work for passengers with hearing or visual impairments, alongside attention to the Public Service Vehicle Accessibility Regulations (PSVAR) timelines and any exemptions that apply to the vehicle type. The Public Sector Equality Duty applies to the whole service, not just the vehicles, so booking channels and customer information are part of the accessibility picture too.

DRT drivers need more than a standard PCV or taxi licence. They have to use the driver app and manage a trip list that changes through the shift, deal confidently and kindly with vulnerable passengers, and know the local network well enough to handle the situations the software does not anticipate. Building this training into the contract, and checking it is delivered at mobilisation rather than assumed, is one of the cheapest ways to protect early passenger experience.

Data ownership, performance management and partnership working

DRT generates far richer data than a fixed route bus: every trip records its origin, destination, requested and actual times, the vehicle’s load factor and the passenger’s booking behaviour. That data is one of the most valuable things the scheme produces, because it tells the authority where demand really is and where a fixed route might one day become viable. So the contract has to be explicit about who owns it and who can access it. Leave this silent and the authority can find, at re-tender, that the data describing its own network sits behind a supplier’s commercial terms.

Secure rights to both real-time and historic data, in open and documented formats, written into the contract. That means the authority can run its own analysis, monitor performance independently rather than relying on the operator’s own reporting, and feed the data into wider network planning tools. Open formats matter because data locked in a proprietary export that only the supplier’s software can read is data the authority does not really control.

Performance management works best through a standing partnership structure rather than ad hoc contract meetings. A quarterly performance board bringing together the authority, the operator, the software provider and, where relevant, community transport partners gives everyone the same view of the KPIs and a forum to agree changes to zones, hours or service standards based on evidence. The board is also where problems get surfaced early, while they are still cheap to fix.

Data protection and cyber security need proper attention because the system holds personal data and payment details. The arrangements should comply with UK GDPR and the relevant sector security standards, and the contract should set out responsibilities for breach handling, data retention and the secure transfer of records at any future change of supplier. This is not box-ticking: a DRT platform holds the travel patterns of identifiable, often vulnerable, individuals.

Surbon Consulting helps clients specify data and reporting requirements in tenders and design the performance framework that sits on top of them, including the incentives and remedies that link operator payment to the KPIs that actually matter. A performance regime that measures everything and rewards nothing changes no behaviour; the design work is in choosing the few measures worth holding the operator to.

Launching and operating a DRT service

A DRT scheme can have a sound business case, the right zones and good software and still fail in its first three months if the launch is mishandled. Operational readiness and communication are where well-planned schemes most often come unstuck, because they are the parts that feel like they can be sorted out nearer the time and then cannot. A passenger who tries a new service in week two, has a poor experience and tells their neighbours is a passenger, and several others, lost for a long time.

Treat the first 6 to 12 months as a live pilot rather than a finished network. The data will reveal things the planning could not, zones will need adjusting, and the booking rules that looked right on paper will need tuning against real demand. Building that expectation into the contract and the political conversation up front is far easier than explaining mid-year why the service is changing. The sections below cover the soft launch, communication and marketing, customer experience, and day-to-day operations.

Surbon Consulting supports mobilisation for new contracts, including readiness reviews before go-live, risk management through the launch window, and troubleshooting the early performance problems that every new scheme throws up.

Soft launches, pilots and phased roll‑out

A soft or phased launch is the single most effective way to de-risk a new DRT scheme. Starting with a limited area, reduced hours or a capped number of vehicles lets the operator test the systems, refine the business rules and gather real passenger feedback before the service is exposed to full demand. The booking flow, the optimisation settings, the driver app and the call centre scripts all reveal their flaws in live operation, and it is far better to find them with 200 passengers than 2,000.

Gloucestershire’s Robin grew this way, starting with a small number of zones and expanding coverage as the operation proved itself and demand built. The contrast is with schemes that launched at full scale across a wide area and then had to retrofit changes to zones or vehicle types under public scrutiny, which is slower, more expensive and more damaging to confidence than getting it right in a contained pilot first.

A pilot of 3 to 6 months is usually long enough to learn what matters. Monitor reliability, booking fulfilment, and early uptake among the specific user groups the scheme is meant to serve, rather than headline trip numbers alone, because a service that is busy but failing its target users has not succeeded. Set the success criteria before the pilot starts, so the decision to scale up is made against evidence rather than optimism.

Plan contingencies before launch, not during the first crisis. Have clear protocols for IT outages, driver shortages and unexpectedly high demand, including how the service will temporarily restrict bookings or add capacity. A scheme that is overwhelmed by its own early popularity and turns passengers away with no plan can squander the goodwill that a successful launch generates.

Marketing, branding and passenger communication

The marketing job for DRT is harder than for a bus, because passengers already understand what a bus is and have to learn what a DRT service is. The messaging has to answer five questions plainly: what the service is, who it is for, how to book, what it costs and how it connects to the buses and trains people already use. Keep it consistent across every channel, because a passenger who hears three slightly different versions concludes the scheme does not know what it is either.

Use multiple channels, because the target users are not all reachable the same way. Digital advertising and social media reach younger and working-age passengers; printed leaflets and posters, bus stop information, local press and community radio reach the older and rural residents who often need the service most and use the internet least. Outreach through community organisations, GP surgeries, libraries and parish councils carries the message to people no advertising campaign will find.

Give the service a distinct identity, a name, colours, vehicle livery and app branding, that still sits visibly within the wider local transport brand. The balance matters: a service with no identity of its own is forgettable, but one that looks completely separate from the local network confuses passengers about how it connects to their bus or train. The brand should say both this is something new and this is part of your transport network.

Face-to-face beats broadcast for a service this unfamiliar. Launch events, demonstrations on the vehicles themselves, and hands-on app training sessions in village halls and at hubs like hospitals and colleges do more to build early use than any amount of advertising spend, because they let people try the booking process with someone beside them.

Target the groups that default assumptions tend to miss. Young people, carers and low-income households all have transport needs a DRT service can meet, reached through the channels they actually trust. And work actively against the two perceptions that quietly limit uptake: that DRT is only for older people, or only for the tech-savvy. A service seen as belonging to one narrow group will never reach the patronage its business case assumed.

Customer experience and booking support

The DRT experience is made or broken at the point of booking. The interface, whether app, web or phone, should be quick and intuitive, and it should give the passenger clear confirmation of their pick-up window, the fare and any transfer point. Ambiguity at booking, an unclear pick-up time or an unexplained wait, is what turns a curious first-time user into someone who decides the service is unreliable and goes back to whatever they did before.

Resource the call centre or booking line properly, especially in rural areas with older populations and lower smartphone use. The phone channel is not a fallback for the app; for a large share of DRT passengers it is the primary way they book, and it needs clear operating hours and a service standard for how quickly calls are answered. A booking line that rings out or queues for ten minutes excludes exactly the passengers the service often exists to reach.

Build in third-party booking from the start, so a carer, family member or support worker can book on behalf of someone who cannot use the channels themselves, and set clear policies on escorting children and vulnerable adults. These are not edge cases in rural DRT; they are a meaningful part of the demand, and a service that cannot accommodate them has narrowed its own market.

Make feedback easy and act on it visibly. In-app ratings, post-journey surveys and a helpline give passengers a route to be heard, and responding promptly to complaints and suggestions builds the trust a young service needs. Passengers forgive early teething problems when they can see the operator listening; they do not forgive being ignored.

Track customer experience metrics alongside the operational KPIs and bring both to the performance discussions. A service can hit its reliability targets and still be losing passengers because the booking process frustrates them, and only the experience data will show it. Treat satisfaction as a managed outcome, not an afterthought.

Day‑to‑day operational management

Running a DRT service day to day means managing a set of moving parts in real time: scheduling drivers, allocating vehicles, coordinating with the call centre, watching the live performance dashboard and dealing with the incidents and disruptions every operation faces. The control room is the nerve centre, and its job is to keep the promised service standards intact as conditions change through the day.

The platform’s real-time data is what makes active daily management possible. When demand spikes in one part of a zone, the control room can prioritise that corridor; when a zone is producing long, inefficient routings, it can temporarily constrain bookings to protect the passengers already committed to vehicles. These are judgement calls the software supports but does not make, which is why the quality of control room staff matters as much as the quality of the platform.

Write standard operating procedures for the scenarios that recur: late running, vehicle breakdowns, demand exceeding capacity, severe weather, and the points where DRT operations touch emergency planning. Documented procedures mean a new or relief controller handles a breakdown the same competent way as the experienced one, rather than improvising under pressure. The schemes that cope well with disruption are the ones that decided how to cope before it happened.

Review performance together, weekly and monthly, operator and authority side by side. The reports surface the patterns that single days hide: time windows that are consistently overloaded, vehicles that are routinely under-used, zones where demand is shifting. Acting on those patterns is how a service improves over its life rather than ossifying around its launch-day assumptions.

Surbon Consulting helps clients build the operational playbooks and the training programmes for control room and supervisory staff that turn a good platform into a well-run service. The software is necessary but not sufficient; the operating discipline around it is what passengers actually experience.

Reviewing, adapting and transitioning between DRT and fixed routes

A DRT service should change over its life. Demand moves, new housing and employment come on stream, budgets tighten and loosen, and the network around the service evolves. A scheme run as a fixed installation, launched and then left untouched until re-tender, slowly drifts out of step with the demand it was built to serve. The authorities that get the most from DRT treat it as an asset to be actively managed, with a clear view of when a corridor has matured enough to justify a fixed route and when a service has done its job.

That management rests on four things: evaluating performance honestly, using the data to improve the wider network and not just the DRT service, making evidence-based decisions to scale up or down, and handling changes of operator or technology without disrupting passengers. The sections below take each in turn.

Align the review cycle with the contractual breakpoints and the wider network reviews, the enhanced partnership plan or franchise review dates, so that decisions about the DRT service are made in step with decisions about the bus network it connects to, rather than in isolation. Surbon Consulting carries out independent service reviews, performance audits and re-specification for re-tenders, bringing an outside view to schemes where the in-house team is too close to see the patterns clearly.

Using data to measure success and inform changes

Run the same core analyses regularly so trends are visible rather than guessed at: trip origin-destination patterns, time-of-day demand, load factors, average waiting times against the agreed window, and cancellation and no-show rates. Each of these tells the authority something it can act on, and tracking them over time matters more than any single month’s snapshot, because DRT demand builds and shifts gradually.

The most valuable thing DRT data reveals is latent demand. When the same origin-destination flow shows up consistently, aggregated and at predictable times, that corridor may now support a fixed route bus, or a semi-fixed route with timed departures, at a lower cost per passenger than continuing to serve it flexibly. This is DRT working as a network discovery tool: it finds the demand that justifies fixed infrastructure, which is something a conventional network review struggles to do from the outside.

Set formal review points at 6, 12 and 24 months after launch, comparing performance against the original KPIs and deciding on adjustments to zones, hours, fares or fleet mix. Fixed review dates force the decisions that otherwise drift, and they give the operator and the authority a shared rhythm for change rather than a series of reactive tweaks.

Feed the data into wider transport planning. DRT trip patterns can show where a new bus stop, shelter or interchange would do the most good, and where infrastructure investment would support the network as a whole. The service is generating evidence about how people actually move around a rural area, which is worth more than the trips alone.

Report transparently to councillors, boards and the public, showing the challenges as well as the successes. A review that only reports good news loses credibility the first time a passenger’s experience contradicts it, and honest reporting of what is not working is what earns the political room to fix it. Managing expectations openly is cheaper than rebuilding trust after a quietly buried problem surfaces.

Adjusting zones, fares and service patterns

Zones are not fixed once set. As the data comes in, authorities can expand a zone where demand is spilling over its edges, contract one that is proving too thin to serve efficiently, or merge and split areas to match how people actually travel. Each change has to stay within the local service registration rules and the contract terms, and changes to maximum journey lengths in particular affect both aggregation and compliance, so they need checking against the registration before they go live.

Operating hours should follow the evidence too. Where the data shows genuine evening demand that the current hours cut off, extending operation can capture trips the scheme is currently turning away. Where a mid-day period runs consistently empty, consolidating or trimming it controls subsidy without losing meaningful patronage. The point is to let observed demand, not the launch-day timetable, decide where the vehicle hours go.

Fares are a policy lever, not just a revenue line. Discounted fares for young people can support access to education and employment; targeted off-peak promotions can stimulate travel in quiet periods and improve vehicle utilisation. Used deliberately, fare changes shape demand towards the scheme’s objectives rather than simply recovering cost.

Give passengers and stakeholders proper notice of any significant change, with a clear explanation and, where a service is being reduced, a genuine account of the alternatives. Passengers accept change they understand far more readily than change that arrives unannounced, and a reduction handled with notice and honesty does less damage to trust than a smaller one sprung without warning.

Trial significant changes before committing to them. A 3-month pilot of new zone boundaries or a revised operating pattern, evaluated against pre-defined metrics, tests the change in reality before it becomes permanent. This is the same discipline that makes a soft launch work, applied to a service already running.

Transitioning between DRT and fixed route services

One mark of a successful DRT scheme is that it makes itself partly redundant. As demand builds along a corridor, or as new housing and employment come on stream, the data may show that a conventional fixed route bus is now viable where it was not at launch. Recognising that moment and acting on it is good network management, not an admission that the DRT scheme failed; the flexible service did exactly what it was meant to do by growing the demand that now supports fixed infrastructure.

Plan the transition properly rather than switching overnight. That means demand and revenue modelling to confirm the fixed route stacks up, consultation with the passengers and stakeholders affected, an impact assessment on current DRT users, and coordinated registration and contract changes so the fixed service is registered and ready as the DRT provision steps back. Rushing any of these risks a gap in service that strands the people the corridor was built to serve.

Mixed models are often the answer rather than a binary switch. DRT can feed passengers into a new fixed trunk route as a first and last-mile connection, or a fixed route can run at the peaks while DRT fills the off-peak gaps that would never sustain a scheduled bus. The flexible and fixed elements work as one network, each doing what it does best, rather than competing for the same trips.

Protect the passengers who depend on the door-to-door or near-door service above all. A fixed route that is efficient for the majority can strand an older or disabled passenger who cannot reach the new bus stop, and the social inclusion case that justified the DRT scheme in the first place does not disappear when a fixed route arrives. Retaining a targeted flexible offer for those users, alongside the new fixed service, is usually the right answer.

Surbon Consulting supports authorities in designing these transition strategies and in re-tendering both the DRT and the fixed route services so the contracts reflect the network as it now is, rather than as it was when the DRT scheme launched.

Managing provider and technology changes

As the DRT market matures, authorities will change operators or software platforms at re-tender, and a change handled carelessly disrupts every passenger who relies on the service. The risk is highest where a single supplier held the operation, the platform and the data under one contract, because then a change of supplier can mean a change of app, a loss of passenger accounts and a break in the data record all at once.

Write data and continuity requirements into the contract from the outset. The authority should have the right to a clean handover of user accounts, saved preferences and historic trip records, in documented formats, at the end of the contract. The time to secure this is when the contract is being drafted and the incumbent wants to win it, not at re-tender when their leverage is greatest and the authority’s is least.

Where the platform itself is changing, migrate in phases rather than overnight. Running the new app or call centre alongside the old one for a transition period, with intensive passenger support through the switch, lets people move across at their own pace rather than waking up to a service they no longer recognise. Older and digitally-excluded passengers in particular need that hand-holding, and a clean cut-over that works for the operator can be the moment a vulnerable passenger gives up on the service.

Use the first contract to make the next one better. The mobilisation problems, the KPIs that did not drive the right behaviour, the risk allocation that turned out wrong, all of it is evidence for a sharper specification next time. The authority that re-tenders on the basis of what it learned, rather than re-issuing the original specification unchanged, gets a materially better second contract.

A structured lessons-learned exercise across the authority, operator and technology partner captures that knowledge before the people who hold it move on. Surbon Consulting facilitates these reviews as a neutral party, which tends to surface the candid assessments that the contracting parties are wary of putting in writing to each other.

How Surbon Consulting supports DRT strategy and delivery

Surbon Consulting is a specialist transport and sustainability advisory practice working with public authorities and operators on DRT and wider bus network projects across the UK and the Middle East. We sit on the client’s side of the table, bringing experience from multiple flexible transport schemes to bear on the specific decisions an authority or operator is facing, from the first question of whether DRT is the right tool through to the performance review three years after launch.

Our DRT work spans the full lifecycle. We carry out opportunity assessment and business case development to test whether and where DRT adds value. We provide bid strategy and bid writing for DRT and flexible bus contracts. We support network and operations design, integrate sustainability and social value properly rather than as an afterthought, and provide mobilisation support through the launch window. You can read more about our bid writing services here.

On the procurement side, we help authorities write DRT tender specifications, evaluation criteria and scoring matrices that attract high-quality bids and stand up to scrutiny under the Procurement Act 2023. A well-drafted specification does more to secure a good outcome than any amount of evaluation effort applied to weak bids, and getting the criteria right is what lets an authority defend its award decision with confidence.

We also work with clients after award, where many schemes need the most help and get the least. That includes setting up KPIs and performance dashboards, facilitating the early operator and authority workshops that build a working relationship before problems arise, and supporting the mid-term reviews and rebids that keep a service matched to its demand.

If you are planning a DRT scheme, a bus franchising competition or an enhanced partnership where flexible transport could play a part, we would welcome an early conversation.

Frequently asked questions about demand responsive transport

This FAQ covers the practical questions that come up repeatedly in DRT planning and procurement and that the main sections above do not fully answer. The answers are written for senior officers and operators and assume the working knowledge that audience brings.

The answers reflect current UK practice up to 2025/26. DRT is a fast-moving area, so check the latest national guidance and your local regulations before acting on anything time-sensitive. The examples are UK-focused, but the underlying principles adapt to other markets, including the Gulf, with the funding and governance differences noted earlier in this guide.