Edinburgh Napier University

  The paper considers the contribution that focused Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) may make to the delivery of improved access to work in rural Scottish locations. Whilst access to employment is treated as a generic issue in policy-related discussions, transport gaps are a specific and personal issue – particularly at the local and rural scales. Employment is thus treated as an issue to be solved across a wide range of metrics, while transport, where solved on the wide scale will often fail to deliver at the local scale, with demonstrable gaps between provision and need being visible in rural communities. The differences between the generic and the specific, and a natural concentration on larger, rather than individual solutions, have led to a gap between needs identified on the micro-scale and solutions applied from a regional or council scale. The Transport to Employment service (T2E), a project operated within the Highlands of Scotland, provides an indication of alternatives appropriate to achieving rural access to work designed with individuals’ needs in mind at the local scale; and the effects of increased access to the communities served. The paper describes the background to the development of T2E and the effects that the service has had on the employment markets in the areas served. The paper concludes by comparing the costs and effectiveness of T2E with other similar access to work schemes (e.g. wheels to work, other DRT or minibus-based schemes) and with the costs of more traditional transport services. It is identified that, when considering access to employment, significant benefits may be achieved by the use of focused DRT in preference to more traditional responses to increasing access in rural communities