This project's vision is to encourage sustainable mobility habits that can take advantage of new mobility services. There are enormous debates over whether emerging mobility services (like ride-hailing and bikesharing) are complementary or competitive to public transit. This project believes it would be beneficial to experiment with specific forms of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) in the urban core of a congested metropolitan area (e.g. Boston), wherein public transit can focus on high-quality “mass†transit while allowing for emerging mobility services to complement and feed into public transit. Modern ICTs can provide travelers with a richer set of mobility alternatives that suit individual circumstances and affordability. This project envisions a pilot program that provides low-income workers in targeted communities with mobility service bundles at subsidized costs. Low-income workers can then increase their use of active mobility (which has health benefits) and multi-modal shared services to access more opportunities. The MaaS model also provides tangible benefits for the COVID recovery plan, wherein buses from low-demand routes can be repurposed to better match demand on high-volume routes without eliminating options for car-less individuals on the low-volume routes. This project hopes to learn how preferences for different non-car services vary by time, circumstance, and affordability, in order to extend our findings to the design of a long-term MaaS model that can reverse the trend of rising car ownership in Metro Boston.
This project has already analyzed public transit ridership (from MBTA and Transit app) and commuting flows (from US Census Bureau) to preliminarily identify communities and bus routes that are most suitable for the pilot. Low-income commuters along identified bus routes will be recruited to participate in a stated preference survey, which will used to identify willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-switch for alternative (non-private-car) mobility services. Such alternatives include overlapping commuter rail routes (e.g. Fairmount Line), bikesharing, and mobility-on-demand (EZRide/ private shuttles/ ride-hailing). Based on the survey, this project will design a randomized controlled trial that provides voucher programs for targeted individuals. Subsidy levels could even be adjusted periodically based on real-time peak-hour public transit overcrowding data provided by Transit app. MaaS vouchers will be distributed among recruits during the pilot phase, and data on real-time mobility choices will be collected for two months. Finally, this project will evaluate the effectiveness of providing flexible MaaS at both the individual level (e.g. sustainable mobility choices and increased accessibility) and the system level (e.g. lower risk of overcrowding on high-volume bus routes and lower car use). This project is supported by the CIVIC Innovation Challenge program Track A. Communities and Mobility: Offering Better Mobility Options to Solve the Spatial Mismatch Between Housing Affordability and Jobs through a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Energy Vehicle Transportation 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.
