Participation in out-of-school-time (OST) opportunities has been shown to improve access to internships as well as help youth develop workforce readiness and cultivate occupational identities. However, in sprawling low-density metro areas like Kansas City, unreliable and inefficient transportation services combined with the physical disconnect between residential areas, jobs, and OST opportunities makes these opportunities less accessible to low-income Black and Latinx students. This project’s goal is to increase OST accessibility and awareness and improve system efficiency (e.g., minimize energy consumption) by integrating shared-mobility and mobility-as-a-service options into existing strategic and operational planning tools.
The project entails development, piloting, and evaluation of an Optimized Unified Transportation (OUT) framework that increases awareness of OST opportunities; decreases access disparity through innovative and efficient shared-mobility services, policies, and governance; and incentivizes energy-efficient travel choices. Principal advances include: (i) innovative analysis of student mobility needs and preferences that considers incentives to encourage participation and energy-efficient travel behaviors, (ii) first-of-their-kind travel-demand models that consider social-welfare outcomes, (iii) development and testing of a community-driven OST-opportunity-accessibility framework that includes shared mobility, business models, policies, and governance, and (iv) development and testing of a youth-friendly mobile-application-based technology that incorporates the developed framework. This planning grant will be used to convene a Collaborative Engagement Stakeholder Group (CESG) of community stakeholders, community members, researchers, and civic organizations from the Kansas City metro area. The CESG will engage students (ages 14-18), parents, mobility providers, school and city officials, and employers to identify acceptable shared-mobility solutions, policies, and governance. The CESG will collaboratively develop novel models to understand the impacts of these solutions and incentive strategies on students’ travel choices. These solutions and models will be integrated in the OUT framework, optimized through simulation for societal benefit and system efficiency, and implemented in a mobile application for real-world piloting and evaluation. Through these activities, this planning grant will bring together the community partners, identify solutions, and determine the requisite data and tools for pilot implementation and assessment. The planning activities will also engage underrepresented students and undergraduate students to provide them exposure to research activities.
This project is in response to Track A – CIVIC Innovation Challenge - Communities and Mobility a collaboration with NSF and the Department of Energy.
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.
