Low-mid income residents living in affordable housing areas of a city are often faced with problems in accessing jobs or other locations of opportunity due to limited mobility choices including the lack of a public transportation system. Since the underlying problem is usually the high and therefore unfeasible cost of operating public transportation or other similar mobility options, operation of a fleet of ride hailing and ride-sharing autonomous vehicles that can also be used for the delivery of food and supplies during a pandemic like the current Covid-19 outbreak is proposed as a feasible solution. This approach of deploying ride Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAV) in a transit desert will give residents an on-demand, fast and affordable option of connecting to their job locations, allowing them to have faster and reliable access to work, services and amenities that are otherwise not so easily accessible in reasonable travel periods. The broader impact of this project is to benefit society and advance the desired societal outcome of improving access to jobs from low-mid income neighborhoods in a smart city. The team will be addressing these needs from both the technological perspective of SAVs as well as from the social science dimension of this technology can both work with the community and be shaped by it.
This project brings together researchers from several disciplines with community partners to plan an affordable, innovative mobility solution that better connects residents to work, critical services, and amenities. The research pilot deployment that will be planned in this project is the use of SAVs in the City of Marysville, Ohio to give its residents a fast and affordable option of connecting to their job locations. The SAVs will be fully electric vehicles with an optimal routing algorithm that will reduce their trip time and energy footprint. The project team will identify demand locations corresponding to affordable housing in Marysville and destination locations corresponding to jobs, determine the geo-fenced area of SAV operation, plan integration with the existing transportation systems for increasing trip range, analyze existing traffic data, build an SAV operation simulation environment for the chosen geo-fenced area and use it to plan a research pilot deployment. The project team will also identify vendors and methods for operation of the pilot. The planning work of this Stage 1 planning project will be compiled into a Stage 2 proposal and will include the plan for the Stage 2 research pilot and how it will be evaluated for success. This project is funded in response to CIVIC Innovation Challenge Track A. Communities and Mobility: Offering Better Mobility Options to Solve the Spatial Mismatch Between Housing Affordability and Jobs which is a collaboration between NSF and Department of Energy Vehicle Technology Office.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
