Understanding its Impacts on the Transportation Network, are Critical to Balancing Public Goals with Commercial Interests.
Mobility on Demand Planning and Implementation: Current Practices, Innovations, and Emerging Mobility Futures
Background
Mobility on Demand (MOD) is the US Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) vision for a “seamless mobility and goods delivery ecosystem that is safe, reliable, and equitable for all users.” USDOT aims to achieve this vision by “leveraging innovative technologies and facilitating public-private partnerships.”
This project developed a practical resource document to inform pilots and demonstrations, integration and research efforts, and policy development for MOD. The resource provided an overview of the field and focused on sharing the current understanding of MOD planning and implementation best practices. The project team utilized multiple methods to identify best practices, including a review of current literature and studies, input from experts from the public sector, private sector, and academia, and from webinars with leaders in this area.
Lessons Learned
Some of the most important findings from this project include:
- Consumers are increasingly assigning economic values to modes and engaging in multimodal decision-making processes based on a variety of factors including cost, travel time, wait time, number of connections, convenience, and other attributes.
- A number of stakeholders are involved in, influenced by, or affected by MOD. Stakeholders can have a variety of similar and differing roles, such as regulating MOD at various levels of government; providing mobility and delivery services; providing or linking to public transportation; providing information and fare payment services; and managing transportation networks.
- State, regional, and local public agencies can integrate MOD into long-range plans, short-range improvement programs, location-based plans, and issue-based plans to prepare for current and future changes in transportation.
- Incorporating MOD in transportation modeling may be difficult due to traditional data collection and modeling methods (i.e., modes are excluded from traditional travel surveys, and new supply and demand management strategies may be too complex to model given existing data limitations).
- Multimodal integration can improve connectivity and traveler convenience and can be achieved through the physical co-location of mobility services, integrated fare payment across modes, and information integration tools, such as trip planning apps and multimodal aggregators.
- MOD may be able to enhance accessibility for underserved communities, but it may also have adverse impacts if a particular population or community bears a disproportionate share of the benefits or adverse impacts of MOD.
