Abstracts Transportation

Public mobility on demand services: Use cases and equity impacts in the U.S. before and during the Covid-19 pandemic

by Emma Lucken

With the rise of app-based, on-demand transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft, public transportation agencies began piloting their own on-demand services to test whether the technology could attract new riders or improve service for existing riders. These pilots multiplied in the Covid-19 pandemic, when fixed-route ridership plummeted, as a way to serve remaining transit-dependent riders and essential workers with fewer vehicles. Questions about these publicly funded mobility on demand (MOD) and microtransit services focus on their environmental, efficiency, and transportation equity impacts: do they reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by attracting drivers away from personal vehicles and TNCs, or increase it by inducing trips and shifting trips from non-motorized / higher-occupancy fixed-route modes? Can they serve the same number of passengers per hour as low-ridership bus routes, at lower cost? Do they disproportionately benefit low-income, transit-dependent populations or well-resourced groups that could afford Uber/Lyft? This abstract describes research objectives and overarching methodology, identifies methodological and empirical contributions, highlights key results from these contributions, and concludes with policy implications and a summary.Research Objectives: To evaluate the environmental and transportation equity impacts of publicly subsidized on-demand services, I sought to understand: 1) what types of public MOD services currently exist, including benefits and challenges of each type from an environmental, transportation equity, and operational lens; 2) who uses and benefits from public MOD services, how this shifted in the Covid-19 pandemic, and what modes public MOD riders used before; and 3) how public MOD riders perceive public MOD relative to drive alone, TNCs, and fixed-route transit, what service and demographic characteristics impact their likelihood of using each mode, and how this changed in the Covid-19 pandemic. Methodology: To accomplish these objectives, I completed the following: 1) developed a conceptual framework for understanding variation in the design of public MOD services (Chapter 2); 2) surveyed public microtransit riders and non-riders at 14 public transportation agencies across the U.S. and analyzed the results for demographic variation in frequency of public microtransit use before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as induced trips, replaced modes, and satisfaction with the service (Chapter 3); and 3) designed a stated preference experiment to include in the survey to test the impact of public microtransit service characteristics and Covid-19 conditions on mode choice; estimated a mode choice model from the stated preference results, including a flexible variance/covariance matrix with individual variation in shared error terms between modes; and used the mode choice model to forecast mode shares for a range of demographic groups and service designs (Chapter 4). After examining publicly subsidized MOD services more generally for the typology, I…