Girona: How a digital DRT platform mobilised former transport deserts.

The region of Garrotxa has a total population of 59,000 spread over a remote area of 735 sq.km making for a sparsely populated area with an average density of 70 inhabitants per sq.km. Specifically, the municipality of Vall d’en Bas has a population of 3115 spread over a remote area of 90,7 sq.km giving an average density of just 33 inhabitants per sq.km. The desired solution should facilitate creating a flexible bus line connecting villages in the Vall d’en Bas where there exists no bus service, to the region’s urban core of Olot with a population of 36.000.

In July 2021 the transport on demand system (TAD) Clic.cat was put into operation in Vall d’en Bas in the Garrotxa region in the province of Girona, north-eastern Spain. Clic.cat is a public transport service of the Generalitat de Catalunya using nemi’s technology as an on-demand transport platform.

Nemi is a software solution that enables the operation of on demand transport services through a user app, a driver app, a web back-office, and a route optimization algorithm. The available options are shaped by the fixed stops and schedule previously defined by the public transport operator and the competent public authority. For each defined expedition time slot, the requests from users are collected and processed either from the mobile application or the web back-office reservation tool (telephone reservations), for the routing algorithm to then go through all the options and compute the most optimal itinerary for the expedition. Reservations can be made through the nemi application (TAD-TEISA) no later than 15 minutes before the scheduled departure time of the first stop of the corresponding line. The customer receives confirmation of the exact pick-up time, and has real-time information on the position of the vehicle. Reservations can also be made by telephone from Monday to Friday (8:00 am - 8:00 pm). The service runs hourly departures from 7am until 8pm.