1374103 - Equitable Access to Transit- Case Study of Transportation Network Company (TNC) Users in Chicago

Introduction:
Over the past decade, the rapid development and adoption of mobile computing and telecommunications technology has begun to disrupt established business models based on providing mobility services that were previously available primarily through the public sector (particularly public transit agencies) or that were privately provided through households’ and firms’ directly-owned and operated vehicles. Transportation has entered an era of immense change, with many transportation network companies (TNCs) both complementing and competing with public transit.

Problem Statement:
To best serve their communities, public-sector transportation agencies need better information about the degree to which these new mobility services complement or substitute publicly-provided fixed-route mass transit service. A lack of information on TNC usage is a significant barrier to efficient transportation planning and decision-making.

Approach:
This presentation addresses the need for detailed TNC use data by developing a method to identify TNC trips, TNC drivers, and TNC passengers based on mobile device data. To this goal, the researchers have collected TNC pickup and drop-off information from City of Chicago data portal. As of October 21, 2021, the portal includes 215 million trips conducted by TNC users within the City of Chicago. The research team has developed a metric to define ‘equitable access’ to transit for the TNC users. The metric is tested using the TNC database and comparable transit trips as queried from OpenTrip Planner 2 (https://www.opentripplanner.org/) software. The team has compared how TNC drivers and passengers differ in terms of transit richness (transit service density) and in terms of transit supportiveness (housing and employment density).

Results:
The presentation includes numeric measures of complementarity and competition among TNC and public transit providers. The competition is defined by determining what trips were taken via TNC that could have been served with existing transit service. The research team has also compared the TNC user clusters in the pre-pandemic situation and during the COVID-19 pandemic condition. The TNC users are classed into two major groups – the group which had adequate spatio-temporal access to transit vs. the group that had inadequate access. Socio-demographic features of all of these groups were analyzed to gain a comprehensive understanding of the underlying trip-making decisions.

Implication:
The results of this research provide insight on how cities and public transit are impacted by the rise of TNCs. Also, the findings help transit planners to modify the fleet composition and the schedule to avoid ‘transit deserts’, optimize the routes, and reach potential transit users.

Why this topic is important for transportation professionals:
Almost all major cities are grappling with the issue of managing the seemingly unorganized TNC sector. It is upon the transportation professionals to understand the issues clearly and device policies and infrastructure changes accordingly. This presentation will be particularly useful for transportation managers who are interested in different pricing measures to diversify their revenue stream and promote a multi-modal transportation.