PI: Katherine Flanigan
Co-PI(s): Sean Qian
University: Carnegie Mellon University
Industry partner: Move PGH and the City of Pittsburgh Department of Mobility and Infrastructure
As cities improve their holistic transportation networks, emerging mobility options are being integrated rapidly. These modes provide travelers with greater flexibility to construct more convenient trips and reach larger sets of essential services. However, a way to quantify their respective impacts on accessibility across time and space has not been introduced in large-scale networks with cross-modal trips and user-specific parameters; classical accessibility metrics consider single-trip travel time costs and homogeneous populations. This limitation is a salient issue for Pennsylvania cities like Pittsburgh, whose terrain has shaped the city’s siloed communities (with only 75% of households owning cars). With Move PGH and the City of Pittsburgh, the proposed work develops a multimodal network modeling framework to evaluate time-dependent accessibility under generalized travel costs with a focus placed on providing transportation planners with the ability to measure accessibility across time and space and evaluate where, when, and why mobility is underserved. The proposed method is then extended to optimize changes in mobility services and infrastructure investments to improve accessibility for targeted neighborhoods. A full-scale case study is developed in coordination with the collaborating partners to quantify inaccessibility, and siloed communities, and evaluate the effectiveness of transportation interventions such as transit lines and micromobility hubs.