In this paper, we analyze algorithms for the online dial-a- ride problem with request sets that fulfill a certain worst-case restriction: roughly speaking, a set of requests for the online dial-a-ride problem is reasonable if the requests that come up in a sufficiently large time period can be served in a time period of at most the same length. This new notion is a stability criterion implying that the system is not overloaded. The new concept is used to analyze the online dial-a-ride problem for the minimization of the maximal resp. average flow time. Under reasonable load it is possible to distinguish the performance of two particular algorithms for this problem, which seems to be impossible by means of classical competitive analysis.