The community analysis track will employ a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods to assess ridership trends, identify and measure the markets most effectively served by transit, and assess transit’s ability to respond to a changing environment.
Project C1: Transit Agency Short and Long-term Operational Flexibility
The research objective of this project is to identify and evaluate transit agencies’ ability to respond to on-going shocks to the transportation system. From ride-hailing to micromobility to the COVID-19 pandemic, transit has faced a decade of challenges to the status quo. This project would conduct an online survey of 50 transit operators of various sizes across the United States to better understand the constraints and opportunities faced in terms of legislation, contracting, and policy.
View the thesis presentation for this report here.
Project C2: Latest National Analysis of Ridership Trends
This project will build upon the team’s existing work to continue to quantify the impact of different factors affecting transit ridership – including the recent COVID-19 pandemic – at a nation-wide scale. We will extend our multi-city regression analyses to include the most recent, up-to-date data through 2020 using the latest National Transit Database (NTD) ridership statistics for 200+ transit agencies nation-wide. We will use this to identify the “essential” transit ridership that remains during the most recent (2020) period and consider how we might prioritize essential riders going forward.
The code for the following projects is available here: https://github.com/jawadmhoque/transit_ridership_decline
Project C3: Quantifying the Impact of New Mobility on Transit Ridership
The objective of this research project is to quantify the impact of shared micromobility on transit ridership at the metropolitan level. We will assess micromobility trips that include time, origin, destination, and route-level data against route-level ridership data to identify if patterns in the data reveal competition and transit ridership erosion, or complementary services.
The full report for the following project is available here: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/67060
Project C4: New Fare Payment Technology and Pricing Strategies for Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS)
The objective of this project is to evaluate new fare payment technologies and emerging pricing strategies in a step toward integrating transit into a Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) ecosystem. This project aims to evaluate both the technological aspects and potential pricing bundles using surveys of transit riders.
The full report for the match funds that supported this project is available here: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/67064