Shared Mobility

We examine special lanes used by taxis and other shared-ride services to drop-off patrons at airport and rail terminals. Vehicles are prohibited from overtaking each other within the lane. They must therefore wait in a first-in-first-out queue during busy periods. Patrons are often discharged from vehicles only upon reaching a desired drop-off area near the terminal entrance. When wait times grow long, however, some vehicles discharge their patrons in advance of that desired area. A train station in Eastern China is selected as a case study. Its FIFO drop-off lane is presently managed by...

Commuter rail is known to have a “first- and last-mile” problem (i.e., a lack of options for getting commuters to and from a rail station). The first- and last-mile dilemma creates inequalities in access. For example, high-income commuters drive to work (forgoing transit altogether), middle-income commuters drive to a rail station and pay to park, and low-income commuters rely on feeder buses or walking to reach a rail station. Transportation network companies (TNCs), like Uber and Lyft, are a viable option for connecting travelers to rail stations, especially for those who don’t own a car...

Shared-use vehicle services provide members access to a vehicle fleet for use on an as needed basis, without the hassles and costs of individual auto ownership. From June 2001 to July 2002, the authors surveyed 18 U.S. shared-use vehicle organizations on a range of topics, including organizational size, partnerships, pricing, costs, and technology. While survey findings demonstrate a decline in the number of organizational starts in the last year, operational launches into new cities, membership, and fleet size continue to increase. Several growth-oriented organizations are responsible for...

This report, an interim deliverable for Task Orders 5408 and 6408: “Improving Mobility through Enhanced Transit Services”. Thus far in the study we have performed a review of the literature and conducted a small number of site-specific case studies for transit agencies in North America identified from the literature review as either currently having or in the past having had transit-taxi service implemented in their agency’s jurisdiction. We initially classified alternative concepts of transit-taxis into a typology of three service design options based on a review of the literature: 1)...