Rural Mobility Fund
Programme-level monitoring and evaluation
Project details
Full project title: Rural Mobility Fund - programme-level monitoring and evaluation
Sponsor: Department for Transport
Principal Investigator: Professor Kiron Chatterjee
CTS researchers:
End date: 31 March 2025
Project summary
The Rural Mobility Fund (RMF) is a £20 million fund to trial on-demand bus services (Demand Responsive Transport or DRT) in rural and suburban areas of England. The fund is seeking to find out whether DRT can fill a gap in current service provision to create an improved public transport package that better meets the needs of residents in providing access to employment, education, healthcare and other services. It is also seeking to understand barriers and solutions to DRT being a viable and sustainable alternative to traditional public transport.
Fifteen local authorities (LAs) were awarded funding to run DRT pilot schemes between April 2021 and March 2025.
The Department for Transport (DfT) commissioned UWE Bristol to undertake a programme-level evaluation of the RMF. The evaluation study is:
- Conducting a programme-level process evaluation of the RMF to understand the experiences of designing and implementing the DRT pilot schemes and what lessons can be learned
- Collecting monitoring data from LAs for each pilot scheme, analysing the data and summarising programme-level results.