Low income communities in urban environments chronically struggle with access to mobility and the correlated low quality of life metrics. In principle, on-demand ride-sharing services can address these issues by creating an efficient, real-time market—matching drivers with requests. However, the reality for these communities is far different, as the tendency in these services, primarily run by external business owners, is to avoid pickups in low income communities due to safety perception, and lack of trust among users to name a few. This project focuses on ways to empower the residents within these communities to offer connected mobility solution, and investigate their specific needs and operational constraints that are not currently understood enough. The overarching objective of this work is to create an effective collaboration platform for community partners to communicate their mobility challenges and opportunities with researchers (from engineering, social sciences and computer science), industry partners and policy makers, and to steer these engagements towards a concrete plan for a one-year multi-sided pilot project on customized peer-to-peer mobility solutions for low income communities. The holistic nature of this work includes studies on the societal aspects of connected mobility, and how coherent sociotechnical solutions can be created and how their success can be measured by accompanying social studies. If successful, this planning work and its following pilot project will enable transformation in the mobility of many low income communities in the country, and contribute to a more equitable, more efficient, and eventually more prosperous nation.
To overcome the mobility challenges in low-come communities, an empowering approach to on-demand services rooted in these communities is needed. To this end, this project creates a cyberinfrastructure that help the capital and labor arise from within these low-income communities, and mobility demands and resources are linked in a way that is compatible with community resources and needs. In particular, this project will plan an innovative community-focused ride-sharing service—Jitney+. This service effectively connects the community social graph with the resources graph, and the location graph, and addresses (1) the issue of trust among the drivers and passengers, (2) the digital divide and (3) safety concerns related the location and time of access and also to COVID-19 infection. This is done by facilitating effective collaboration among community partners, university researchers, industry partners, and city officials, with the focus on communities in the south side of Chicago and in Champaign County in Illinois. 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.
