Bike, Bus, and Beyond: Extending Cyclopath to Enable Multi-Modal Routing

Project summary:

This project addressed several MnDOT critical issues and strategic directions: easing congestion and improving mobility by making multimodal transit options more easily accessible. It did so by extending the Cyclopath bicycle route-finding system to support multimodal routes that combine cycling and transit. This required extensions to the route-finding algorithm to combine biking and transit appropriately and a user interface to let users express modal preferences and enhance the visual presentation of routes, e.g., to mark mode shifts. The researchers used the Graphserver open-source software as the routing engine; by building on existing software, they reduced development efforts. The researchers also conducted interviews with a number of multimodal transit users to guide the design of the user interface.