Towards Seamless Urban Mobility — Integrating Ride sharing and Public Transit

“Bike-share and car-share programs are springing up everywhere. Cities are innovating and trying to be more agile with public transportation. On-demand systems like Uber and Lyft are becoming popular” says Samitha Samaranayake, Professor at School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell Univeristy. “Many people in urban environments are rethinking the need for personal vehicle ownership” he maintains. “Combine all these with the data we can collect in real time from smart phones and internet-enabled devices and you have a real opportunity to create some great solutions”.

Most of the people all around the world use private cars to travel to work, to accomplish day to day routings. However, most of the commuter trips are single occupant vehicle trips. A recent study indicates, in United States only, single occupant trips represent approximately 77% of all commuter trips. While it seems like single commuter trips are often preferable by the general public, this indeed has led to many serious problems with referenced to traffic congestion. The low vehicle occupancy rates combined with the high number of trips during peak hours often lead to severe traffic congestion in urban areas. The cost of congestion in the United States alone is roughly $121 billion per year or 1% of GDP, which includes 5.5 billion hours of time lost to sitting in traffic and an extra 2.9 billion gallons of fuel burned. This just not waste the human time but also leads to many environmnetal and health hazards like air pollution caused by vehicle emissions and many serious negative health effects.

Ride sharing services are transforming urban mobility by providing timely and convenient transportation to anybody, anywhere, and anytime. Conceptually, ridesharing refers to a mode of transportation in which individual travelers share a vehicle for a trip and split travel costs such as gas, toll, and parking fees with others that have similar itineraries and time schedules. Over the past few years it is pretty much evident that ride sharing services such as Uber and Lyft have got a major popularity within urban mobility groups.

“Ride-sharing services have enormous potential for positive societal impact with respect to congestion, pollution, and energy consumption” says Professor Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Refer figure 1 for a graphical illustration of vehicle shedding, with the ride-hailing utilization rate in USA.

Figure 1 : Vehicle shedding, by ride-hailing utilization rate in USA (source)

While ride sharing services have been able to retain a solid market foundation with daily increasing urban mobility needs, it is worthy to see the negative effect of it as well.

A study done by the University of California-Davis Institute of Transportation Studies have found that after adopting ride-sharing services, there was a net 6% decline in use of transit, based on changes in travel behavior of the study respondents.

Below figure illustrates the impact that has caused by adaptation of ride-hailing services in USA towards the transit use, biking, and walking.

Figure 3 : Segments compared: transit only, transit and ride-hail, ride-hail only, and non-users of shared mobility in USA (source)

Transit and ride-hail : people who use transit in the ways described above, and who have downloaded and use a ride-hailing app.

Ride-hail only : people who have downloaded and use a ride-hailing app, and who do not use transit regularly for common trip-generating activities.

Neither : people who do not use transit regularly and who have not used a ride-hailing app. For the most part, these are car-centric respondents.

An integration of public transit and mobility on demand services could be an ideal solution to keep the genaral public encouraged to use mass transit and to reduce the negative externalities of car travel. However, the inherent challenges in built to this initiative could lag this from implementation in reality. Public transit may not be economically viable in certain suburban and rural areas as they lack the population density to justify public transit. Hence, to attract more riders from suburban areas to public transit, authorities must find adequate solutions to accommodate the first and last mile from the rider’s home to and from the transit stations. One possible solution could be to operate a fleet of demand-responsive vehicles with collaboration of local mobility on demand service providers. This indeed provides value and benefits to both the parties involved. Consider the below example to understand the scenario better.

Figure 4: Example of integration of public transit and ride sharing