Significant research and debate in recent years have surrounded the impacts of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft on transportation systems: whether they reduce the need for personal vehicles, how they contribute to or reduce congestion, and how they impact transit ridership. A recent study published in the Journal of Transport Geography may help shed further light on some of these questions by examining taxi demand and its correlation to land use patterns and access to other travel modes in the Washington D.C. region. As the researchers point out, despite the significant growth of on-demand ride-hailing service providers like Uber and Lyft, taxis remain a key asset for urban mobility that can either complement or compete with other modes.
Multimodal
Access to jobs by transit is on the rise
In most large metropolitan areas, the typical worker could reach more jobs by transit in 2016 than in 2015, according to the newest Access Across America report from the University of Minnesota’s Accessibility Observatory. Accessibility increased in 36 out of 49 regions. These annual reports let individual regions track changes in accessibility over time, scan for accessibility issues within the region, and compare their own performance to other regions.
Where people walk: Two new studies improve “walkability” measurement
In planning and designing for pedestrians, sidewalks are often a good start but rarely make a place walkable on their own. Measuring pedestrian accessibility (the topic of a recent SSTI webinar) depends on two important pieces of information: 1) where destinations are located, and 2) the quality of the walking network connecting to those places. This second point is the focus of two studies.
Colorado city teams with Uber app to summon on-demand transit
In a first-of-its-kind partnership in the U.S., a city has partnered with Uber to use existing transit vehicles to provide on-demand service. Resident of Lone Tree, Colorado, can now use the Uber app to request a 12-passenger vehicle and driver provided by the city’s Link service. Other riders may be picked up along the way. The ride is free through the end of December anywhere in the city. The genesis of the partnership with Uber came about through the Smart Cities Collaborative, a collaboration of Transportation for America and Sidewalk Labs.
SSTI releases Connecting Sacramento: A trip-making and accessibility study
For several years, SSTI has worked to advance best practices in the use of two emerging technologies: accessibility metrics and trip-making data from mobile devices. Our recently completed study, Connecting Sacramento, was an essential part of that effort. This study brings together these technologies and tests their application in identifying and prioritizing first- and last-mile-connections to transit, among other uses.
Connecting Sacramento
Connecting Sacramento is the first study to incorporate both accessibility analysis and tripmaking data, including data from multiple sources, and assess how they can be used together to guide transportation- and land use-related decisions. This study focused specifically on opportunities to improve first- and last-mile connections to light rail transit in Sacramento, but its findings are widely applicable.
Accessibility in practice (SSTI and Virginia Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment, 2017)
Planning agencies and transportation decision makers often talk about the importance of improving access to destinations, but they rarely have the tools or resources to measure accessibility and incorporate those metrics into decision making. This report guides agencies through that process.
Accessibility for all: Open source options for measuring access to destinations
As highlighted in two recent SSTI webinars in March and April of this year, accessibility measures are becoming more useful in practice. The most notable examples rely on proprietary data and methods, but open source approaches are also gaining traction, while highlighting the need for more reliable, open data. Accessibility measures describe how easily people can reach destinations, usually in terms of travel time, given the existing transportation system and land use patterns.
New research reinforces the importance of the built environment to cycling mode share
A recently published study from Montreal sheds new light on the importance of the built environment in influencing bicycle commuting and the resulting impacts on greenhouse gas emissions. The researchers also estimated the effect of bicycle infrastructure accessibility on cycling mode share. They estimated the effect of the new bicycle infrastructure as yielding a 1.7 percent reduction in transportation GHG emissions, roughly equivalent to the estimated effects of replacing the city’s buses with hybrid models and electrifying the city’s commuter trains.
Learning from transit performance measures and data in California
The California Department of Transportation sponsored a newly released report, Transit Performance Measures in California, by the Mineta Transportation Institute, as part of the agency’s efforts to understand what data and performance measures are being used by MPOs and transit agencies in the state.