Now that the review period is completed and the dust is settled, eleven papers will be presented at the 100th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board to be held virtually in January 2021. The titles and authors are listed in the image, with funding support from NSF, FTA, and C2SMART.
Our platform analysis methodology developed initially with Dr. Saeid Rasulkhani was applied to the Kussbus microtransit service in Luxembourg when it was still operating, and we found its operation unsustainable. MaaS platforms and service operators interested in understanding the stability of their operations (and the necessary interventions) might find this work of interest to help make future services more viable. The work was funded by NSF CMMI-1634973.
Open Access link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23249935.2020.1820625
How do we evaluate societal impacts of an emerging transportation technology that does not have operational data yet? Nick Caros used a day-to-day agent simulation of both travelers’ and operators’ learning to evaluate the impacts of using modular autonomous vehicle fleets with en-route transfer capability under different operational settings to connect commuters between Dubai and Sharjah.
This was Nick’s MS thesis work with Next Future Transportation. He was funded by C2SMART, and Prof. Chow was partially supported by NSF EAGER CMMI-2022967. The published article can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1080/21680566.2020.1809549
As mobility shifts from single operators to platforms of multiple operators, there needs to be new techniques to analyze and design such systems. In this research with Ted and Saeid, we develop a new model framework and solution method to analyze MaaS ecosystems. It accounts for the incentives of operators to compete and work together to serve multimodal trips for travelers. As such, the model can be used to analyze the impacts of one operator’s capacity increase on other operators, identification of stable cost exchanges, between operators and travelers, firm entry/exit, changes in technology (like new matching algorithms) from one operator on the ecosystem, etc. When the number of operators simplifies to one, the model becomes a conventional capacitated multicommodity flow problem. The research was funded by NSF CMMI-1634973.
The paper can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trb.2020.08.002
Saeid is currently a Senior Research Engineer at Scoop Technologies while Ted is a Revenue Management Analyst at American Airlines.
Our work on incorporating AI into the process of designing transit routes is now published. This helps transit agencies that periodically update their routes to both learn from and serve their users. It also makes a case for automated transit fleets that can grow organically as they learn and adapt to their markets. The work is funded by NSF CMMI-1652735 and C2SMART.
The Federal Transit Administration commissioned the BUILT lab to work on a white paper reviewing and exploring the range of public transit operations from fixed route to on-demand microtransit. The completed 156-pg report is now available to access. It includes almost 300 references and links to data (B63 bus route in Brooklyn) and code for a simulation tool to evaluate different transit operations (fixed route, flex-route, door-to-door microtransit). This should be useful to transit agencies (e.g. New York City Transit) looking for an overview of state-of-the-art methods in flexible solutions.
A link to the project and the compendium can be found here.
Gyugeun Yoon’s work looks at unlimited-ride pass pricing (specifically Citi Bike’s 1-day and 3-day passes) and finds a pricing policy that can improve both revenues for Citi Bike and user welfare. This work should be of interest to operators designing unlimited ride pass programs to determine appropriate prices to set.
The paper is available open access at the following link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2046043020300058
Nine of our lab’s research papers were accepted for presentation at the upcoming 99th TRB Annual Meeting in January at Washington DC. The topics revolve around MaaS, optimal learning for fleet management, and emerging technologies like e-scooters, modular autonomous vehicles, and air taxis.
In this research with Nick Caros, we studied the effects of violent crime on active transportation modes like walking and biking in NYC and found that an increase in crime has a much greater impact on bike ridership than it does on walking, but the sensitivity of the former is still several times less than to collision rate. The work was partially supported by the C2SMART UTC.
Paper available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214367X18302060
A team formed from BUILT members, including Ziyi Ma, Gyugeun Yoon, Brian Yueshuai He, and Jinkai Zhou, participated in and won the first Microtransit Hackathon organized by IATR and the Transportation Alliance, with sponsorship from Curb. The team will go on to receive their award and present the work at Mobilize 2019, the annual convention and expo of The Transportation Alliance, to be held at Bally’s in Las Vegas on Oct. 16-19, 2019.
The news release from Tandon can be found here: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/nyu-built-lab-team-wins-microtransit-hack-thon