SCC-CIVIC-PG Track A: Piloting On-Demand Multimodal Transit in Atlanta

In the United States, car ownership remains the best predictor of upwards social mobility. Those without a car are grievously disadvantaged in accessing jobs, health care, and decent groceries. Moreover, housing patterns further limit social mobility, as low-income populations often reside far away from job opportunities and have few efficient public transit options.

Ride-hailing services have sometimes helped in providing additional mobility options. But, in general, they have widened inequalities in accessibility, servicing the needs of an affluent population, reducing the revenues of transit authorities, and increasing congestion and emissions. The importance of transit has also being highlighted during the pandemic.

This award envisions a future for public transit that meets these mobility challenges for all population segments through the concept of On-Demand Multimodal Transit Systems (ODMTS). ODMTS combine on-demand services to serve low-density regions with high-occupancy vehicles (buses and/or trains) to travel along high-density corridors. The resulting door-to-door services have been shown to improve convenience, reduce costs, and provide a unique opportunity to expand services and job accessibility in neighborhoods where traditional transit systems have been too costly.

To validate the concept of ODMTS at scale, this civic engagement project explores pilots in Atlanta, the city of Smyrna in Cobb county, and Gwinnett county. By studying complementary high-impact pilot settings, i.e., transit deserts, cities with no transit systems, counties in need of better connections to a large city, and support for low-income population, the project hopes to create a blueprint for the deployment of a new generation of transit systems across the country.

To support these pilots, this award researches the scientific and technological advances to translate the concept of ODMTS into successful pilots. In particular, it explores four research threads to overcome knowledge gaps: (1) the modeling of mobility patterns and their relationship to the built environment, capturing future housing and retail profiles; (2) the joint optimization of mode adoption and network design; (3) the joint optimization of on-demand and recurrent requests; and (4) the modeling of the transit regulatory environment ((ADA, EEO, Title VI).

This award adopts a community-driven participatory design, sustained by advanced simulations, visualizations, and metrics to highlight the potential impact of ODMTS on mobility needs and budgets. The blueprint for deploying ODMTS in cities around the country consists of a software pipeline that covers the data analytics, predictive models, optimization technology, mobile applications, and high-performance computing architecture that plan and operate the transit systems.

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.