Principal Investigator(s):
Alireza Khani, Associate Professor, Civil, Environmental and Geo-Engineering
Project summary:
The advent of smartphone technology and the emergence of Internet of things have made available new and integrated transportation options. A significant breakthrough in this domain is the rise of Mobility as a Service (MaaS), an integrated platform that presents all the available transportation options and allows their booking/e-ticketing. Such integrated platform makes various transportation modes accessible to residents, a benefit that would not have been available without the technology. The accessibility to the integrated mobility options could be beneficial both to individual travelers through better mobility options and to the society through reduced vehicle miles traveled (VMT). This research project aims to study southern Minnesota's MaaS platform that is under development by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) through the Federal Transit Administration's (FTA's) Accelerating Innovative Mobility (AIM) grant. The research team will work closely with MnDOT's project management team and the platform development team to study the following questions: 1) How do residents of the southern Minnesota region benefit from having access to a variety of mobility options through an integrated MaaS platform? 2) To what extent does the MaaS platform help increase transit ridership thus reduce personal vehicle use? 3) How can the features of the platform, e.g., route planning or pricing, be optimized for higher system efficiency and benefits to the residents?