aking public transport as flexible as private focuses attention on improving the last mile between multimodal hubs and the home/work destination.
The concept of ‘the last mile’ came into common language when telecommunications and cable television companies sought to deliver faster and better services to their customers. Although they can get data to hubs and exchanges quickly and cheaply, the challenge becomes far more complicated when it comes to reaching the final destinations and wires and cables have to fan out to multiple homes and offices. Not only is connecting the last mile more expensive than other parts of a network but it is also often in the last mile where loss of service quality occurs: reliability diminishes the farther you are away from the local exchange.
The same challenge occurs in the logistics sector as organisations increasingly offer their customers direct deliveries to home or office. Many firms have therefore been trying to optimise an increasingly