Discovering Potential Market for the Integration of Public Transportation and Emerging Shared-Mobility Services

April 8, 2019 in Faculty Spotlight, Research

Dr. Lili Du, UFTI associate professor, is working on a project funded by the Southeastern Transportation Research, Innovation, Development, and Education Center that aims to understand how emerging travel modes such as shared mobility services, including car-sharing and bike-sharing, will reshape the way people travel. Dr. Du and her team also want to find out how these shared-mobility modes and the current transit system can work together to create new opportunities to serve mobility needs. Specifically, the goal of this project is to make up the gap on how to capture and quantify potential passengers, and where and how emerging mobility services and public transit service can be integrated. The STRIDE Center is housed within the UFTI, and is funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation to develop methods and tools for reducing congestion.

The products generated as a result of this project will be:

  1. Spatial analysis techniques, Identify potential demand market for extending transit market based on network assessment (for first/last mile connection) and land use pattern (for under-served communities and rail/air connections) considering integrated mobility systems;
  2. Machine learning approaches to discover the supply market (i.e., temporal-spatial service gaps) for integrating shared mobility modes and public transit to serve those communities and locations in terms of operation needs;
  3. Integrated models/insights to relate demand-supply potential markets for the inter-modal service integrating shared-mobility and public transit modes.

The results of this study will first benefit public transit agencies and private service providers. Our findings and approaches will help develop long-term visions and strategies in anticipation of the new mobility needs. On the other hand, the improvement of traffic efficiency by promoting of use of multi-modal and sustainable traffic modes will also benefit users of the transportation systems. Thus, the success of this project will benefit both supply and demand sides in urban transportation system.