SCC-CIVIC-PG Track A: Co-Creating Context-Sensitive Mobility Strategies for Advancing the Social and Economic Goals of Low-Income Communities

E4TheFuture and UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center are partnering to develop a mobility hub strategy to overcome spatial mismatch between low-to-moderate income (LMI) housing/jobs in Providence, Rhode Island and Blackstone River Valley. Limited public transit presents challenges in securing/maintaining meaningful employment for marginalized community members lacking personal transportation.

This multi-phase project advances NSF’s mission to improve quality of life by enhancing LMI household mobility to jobs, healthcare, etc. Employing groundbreaking research to better understand LMI decision- making for transportation and job access, the project takes a non-prescriptive approach to community engagement. It develops a replicable process for co-creating mobility strategies through active community engagement, pairing mobility strategies with human services (e.g., mobility training, workforce development) to connect residents with jobs and/or apprenticeships.

The project develops strategies to scale/sustain the project beyond the pilot and a design toolkit that documents engagement, research methods, and data analysis tools that other communities can employ. The project team is multidisciplinary and includes academic partners (Boston University, Brown University, and University of California Berkeley) and community organizations (Mobility Development, Building Futures RI, a workforce/apprenticeship development organization, and local affordable housing community based organizations Preservation of Affordable Housing, and NeighborWorks).

This project employs a community-based participatory mixed-method research approach that responds to participant needs and reflects community desires, demonstrates a pathway to sustainability (longer-term financial viability of mobility business models) and develops a pilot evaluation model. The project combines qualitative (focus groups, listening sessions) and quantitative (survey, US Census) data to spatially analyze relationships among daily mobility challenges and existing transport systems, create mobility strategies and training materials, and develop a sustainable model and pilot evaluation.

This project also has a significant spatial component, integrating participatory mapping procedures with qualitative data collection methods. Engagement frameworks, methods, data, and analysis tools developed as part of this initiative will inform future planning, pilot projects, mobility business models, and research. All materials will be available in a toolkit for use by other communities.

This replicable strategy incorporates challenges impacting employment, which are often omitted from typical mobility assessments. Considering these daily struggles in the mobility hub design, the Stage 2 pilot will foster broader societal outcomes including: 1) Advancement of apprenticeships, employee attendance, job retention/creation (key metrics); 2) Participation of underrepresented populations; 3) Changes in modes used; 4) Vehicle miles traveled/air quality impacts; and, 5) Quality of life.

This project is supported by the CIVIC Innovation Challenge program Track A. Communities and Mobility: Offering Better Mobility Options to Solve the Spatial Mismatch Between Housing Affordability and Jobs through a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Energy Vehicle Transportation Office.

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.