Transportation can provide access to employment, services, and social relationships which is key to human beings’ welfare. However, the rampant urban sprawl in the U.S., which causes larger distances between residential locations and various services, employment, and other land uses, boosts automobile dependency. Despite governments’ efforts to develop public transit aiming to improve transportation equity, the low mix of land use patterns and community designs, such as dominant cul-de-sac community street designs, leads to inadequate and inefficient transit services, especially in low-population or low job density areas. Underserved populations can potentially benefit from a new emerging technology-enabled on-demand business model, microtransit, which is operated by public agencies aiming to fill in the gaps in fixed-route transit services.
This research focuses on transportation of underserved people in the Sacramento area of California and aims to explore their barriers to and facilitators of adoption of a technology-enabled on-demand service—microtransit—and how and to what extent it helps get access to services and employment by employing quantitative methods based on data collected through phone and intercept surveys. The microtransit service this research focuses on is SmaRT Ride (SR) which is operated by the Sacramento Regional Transit District (SacRT). The results will help planners understand how underserved populations use and interact with microtransit, what are facilitators of and barriers to its adoption, and what are benefits of its availability in transportation scarce communities. The project will help transit agencies achieve the goal of transportation equity by promoting accessibility across a broader range of socio-demographic groups. This research aims to address a specific Caltrans research need: Best Practices for Organizational Change in Multimodal Project Development and
Delivery.