Impacts of shared mobility on infrastructure usage, greenhouse gas emissions, and accessibility

Project summary:

Shared mobility technologies have emerged only in the past decade, but several forms of shared mobility (transportation network companies, bike sharing, and car sharing) are now widely available in Minnesota. Widespread use of shared mobility results in changes to travel behaviors including vehicle traffic patterns, infrastructure use, and environmental impacts. More specifically, increased use of transportation network companies (e.g. Uber/Lyft) results in empty travel (increasing traffic congestion by up to 42 percent), increases in curb usage for pick-ups/drop-offs, and reductions in parking demand. Use of bike sharing should reduce vehicular travel and greenhouse gas emissions. Car, scooter, and bike sharing increase accessibility, and electric car sharing (like Evie) reduces emissions as well. However, standard planning models do not incorporate shared mobility, so MnDOT cannot currently predict the impacts of shared mobility on infrastructure, emissions, and accessibility. This project will develop a new integrated mode choice and route choice model incorporating shared mobility options. The model will directly predict changes in travel behavior and traffic congestion. The outputs will be post-processed to produce maps of accessibility changes from shared mobility, in particular demonstrating the impact on travel to services like grocery stories and medical facilities. The Environmental Protection Agency's MOVES will be used to predict the impacts on greenhouse gas emissions.