Dial-a-bus is a term used to describe a form of demand activated road based public transport. A common type of dial-a-bus service is one which links a service area to a few major trip attractors. This is known as a 'many-to-few' type of operation and such an operation normally has no fixed routes, bus stops or timetable. In order to design such a service to operate without fixed stops, a method is required for estimating the time required to collect or set down given numbers of passengers in a particular service area. This report provides estimates of the distances to be travelled to connect different numbers of collection or set-down points in service areas of different sizes and shapes. This information allows the round trip time, the required vehicle capacity and hence the productivity of the dial-a-bus service to be estimated for an assumed level of demand. Mean tour distances and standard deviations have been calculated for three different operating strategies for service areas of a number of sizes and shapes