Transportation Commons^™

El Transporte Público: Catalizador De Cambios Económicos Y Sociales, Nathan Wright

Best Integrated Writing

This paper is a comprehensive approach based on research, to a problem whose implications are the function of society itself. The trends, statistics, and problems are linked with an essay’s style that considers the situations of different types of people, from different social classes, professions and roles. The result is a scientific and human text –at the same time– full of evidence and suggested solutions for a better coexistence in a city that was a world leader in air transport. By comparing public transportation with that of other cities, through solid successive arguments, Nathan achieves an objective, convincing text, which …

Beyond Congestion Pricing, Gregory H. Shill

Journal of Law and Mobility

After years of political and legal efforts to block it, congestion pricing finally went into effect in New York City in January 2025. Early indications are positive, though threats to its continuation from the Trump administration and others remain. But its journey to this point has already made one thing clear: it is time for the Big Apple to seize more of its own destiny in transportation policy.

The battles that delayed and still imperil the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s congestion pricing scheme underscore the need for policies that New York City can implement unilaterally. Making urban transportation policy in the …

Shared Tracks, Divided Rule: The Role Of Polycentrism In Shaping Public Transportation In U.S. Metropolises, Dev Purohit

Honors Theses

American public transportation is notably less comprehensive and efficient relative to peer nations. The reliance on private automobiles and commercial air travel for routes that can be served by high-speed rail is a uniquely American phenomenon. This inefficiency is deeply rooted in governance structures, where centralized decision-making has often failed to address the complexities of metropolitan transit systems spanning multiple jurisdictions. This project explores polycentric governance as a potential mechanism to address these shortcomings by fostering competition, enhancing collaboration, and promoting localized responsiveness within metropolitan transit systems. By developing an empirical inventory to measure governance polycentricity and comparing transit outcomes …

Fine-Grained Passenger Load Prediction Inside Metro Network Via Smart Card Data, Xiancai Tian, Chen Zhang, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Metro system serves as the backbone for urban public transportation. Accurate passenger load prediction for the metro system plays a crucial role in metro service quality improvement, such as helping operators schedule train timetables and passengers plan their trips. However, existing works can only predict low-grained passenger flows of origin-destination (O-D) paths or inflows/outflows of each station but cannot predict passenger load distribution over the whole metro network. To this end, this paper proposes an end-to-end inference framework, PIPE, for passenger load prediction of every metro segment between two adjacent stations, by only utilizing smart card data. In particular, PIPE …

Learning About Street Harassment On Transit: A Survey Instrument For Transit Agencies, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Jon Canapary, Carol Anne Caroll, Tam J. Guy, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris

Mineta Transportation Institute

This study was conducted in accordance with California Senate Bill 1161 (2022), legislation that directed the Mineta Transportation Institute to develop a reliable, easy-to-use survey instrument for collecting information from public transit passengers about the extent, location, and characteristics of any street harassment they experience. Although the legislation is focused on large California transit agencies, the study findings are equally relevant to smaller agencies and agencies outside the state. To develop the recommended questionnaire, we reviewed literature about street harassment, analyzed transit passenger surveys to explore the questions asked about safety and harassment, received feedback on iterative drafts of the …

Using Gis To Identify Barriers To Access On The Rtd W Line In Denver, Colorado, Tristan Johnson

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

Denver, Colorado has a long history of public transportation usage beginning with horse-drawn streetcars in 1871. As the automobile began to flourish however, the use of public transportation has languished. In 2013, the W light rail line opened serving the West Denver area. As Denver has moved toward a more transit-oriented growth model, this rail line can create a more vibrant future. Using GIS, a better understanding of the barriers to access for light rail travel is obtained and considering key variables outputs are created to assist policy makers in utilizing the W line. By using GIS to address population …

Transportation Utility Fee To Fund Transit In California, Shishir Mathur, Ralph Robinson

Mineta Transportation Institute

Public transit is a key tool to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to combat climate change; improve safety for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers; and expand accessibility and mobility for all. However, we can only realize this potential by making sufficient investments to provide transit service levels that attract and retain greater ridership. To help with this needed investment, a handful of local governments have turned to transportation utility fees (TUFs), primarily collected as a monthly charge on customers' utility bills or property tax bills. While more widely used to support street maintenance, this study identifies six case studies where TUF …

Public Transportation In Central Florida: Setting The Tone For Public Rail Use, Zoe Johnson

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The purpose of this research is to analyze the use of the public train usage in Central Florida to determine the feasibility of high-speed rail usage in the future. This study will be split into parts and expanded upon. The first part will observe rider perspective, values, and issues regarding rail transportation as is available in Central Florida. In further installations, which will be conducted separately from this thesis, there will be an analysis of the providers of rail transportation. It is hypothesized that there will be a moderate demand for rail transportation used by the public.

Original: The main …

Exploring The Spatially Heterogeneous Effects Of The Built Environment On Bike-Sharing Usage During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Hongtai Yang, Zishuo Guo, Guocong Zhai, Linchuan Yang, Jinghai Huo

Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Bike-sharing holds promise for available and healthy mobility services during COVID-19 where bike sharing users can make trips with lower health concerns due to social distancing compared to the restricted transportation modes such as public transit and ridesharing services. Leveraging the trip data of the Divvy bike-sharing system in Chicago, this study explores spatially heterogeneous effects of built environment on bike-sharing usage under the pandemic. Results show that the average weekly ridership declined by 52.04%. To account for the spatially heterogeneous relationship between the built environment and the ridership, the geographically weighted regression (GWR) model and the semiparametric GWR (S-GWR) …

Context-Aware Graph Convolutional Network For Dynamic Origin-Destination Prediction, Juan Nathaniel, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A robust Origin-Destination (OD) prediction is key to urban mobility. A good forecasting model can reduce operational risks and improve service availability, among many other upsides. Here, we examine the use of Graph Convolutional Net-work (GCN) and its hybrid Markov-Chain (GCN-MC) variant to perform a context-aware OD prediction based on a large-scale public transportation dataset in Singapore. Compared with the baseline Markov-Chain algorithm and GCN, the proposed hybrid GCN-MC model improves the prediction accuracy by 37% and 12% respectively. Lastly, the addition of temporal and historical contextual information further improves the performance of the proposed hybrid model by 4 –12%.

Transportation Barriers Affecting Migrant Workers In Adams County, Pennsylvania, Anna H. Bochenek, Christopher Trilleras

Student Publications

This study examines the transportation patterns and potential barriers among migrant families and workers in Adams County, Pennsylvania. The objective of this study is to determine whether barriers to transportation exist in the county, and if so, how these barriers impact the population facing them. Our study examines solutions such as more universal license policies or a potential public transportation option. To collect data and carry out our project, we distributed surveys in English and Spanish families through the Center for Public Service at Gettysburg College. We had the potential to receive responses from around 70 families, and ultimately received …

Improving The Performance Of Transportation Networks: A Semi-Centralized Pricing Approach, Zhiguang Cao, Hongliang Guo, Wen Song, Kaizhou Gao, Liujiang Kang, Xuexi Zhang, Qilun Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Improving the performance of transportation network is a crucial task in traffic management. In this paper, we start with a cooperative routing problem, which aims to minimize the chance of road network breakdown. To address this problem, we propose a subgradient method, which can be naturally implemented as a semi-centralized pricing approach. Particularly, each road link adopts the pricing scheme to calculate and adjust the local toll regularly, while the vehicles update their routes to minimize the toll costs by exploiting the global toll information. To prevent the potential oscillation brought by the subgradient method, we introduce a heavy-ball method …

A Spatial Analysis Of Supply-Demand Of Public Transportation In Jefferson County, Kentucky., Nastaran Abdoli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Public transportation is important as it serves individuals, especially the transit-dependent population, by providing a basic mobility service to these people and all others who rely on public transportation. This research utilized estimating public transportation demand and supply to analyze the spatial patterns of public transportation in Jefferson County, Kentucky. The study focuses on the transit-dependent population, and it considers indicators of age, poverty status, vehicle ownership, and foreign-born population with less than five years residency in the United States. This study conducted a public transit supply-demand analysis to identify areas with imbalanced supply and demand in Jefferson County at …

City Best Practices To Improve Transit Operations And Safety, Michelle Derobertis, Christopher E. Ferrell, Richard W. Lee, David Moore

Mineta Transportation Institute

Public, fixed-route transit services most commonly operate on public streets. In addition, transit passengers must use sidewalks to access transit stops and stations. However, streets and sidewalks are under the jurisdiction of municipalities, not transit agencies. Various municipal policies, practices, and decisions affect transit operations, rider convenience, and passenger safety. Thus, these government entities have an important influence over the quality, safety, and convenience of transit services in their jurisdictions. This research identified municipal policies and practices that affect public transport providers’ ability to deliver transit services. They were found from a comprehensive literature review, interviews and discussions with five …

Factors Influencing Fixed-Route Transit Decision-Making: Exploring Differences By Disability And Community Type, Jordana L. Maisel, Molly E. Ranahan, Jimin Choi

Journal of Public Transportation

Transit agencies utilize the following complementary initiatives to encourage greater fixed-route transit usage by people with disabilities: (1) implement more rigorous paratransit eligibility determination practices and (2) address the factors that deter people with disabilities from using fixed-route transit. This research focuses on the latter and uses previously conducted survey data to determine the most important factors individuals with disabilities consider when deciding to use various transportation options, and how these factors vary by disability and community type. Findings indicate that individuals with mobility impairments consistently rated the built environment factors as more important to their transit mode decision-making than …

Public Transportation Use By Commuters In The Mountain West, Francisco Reyes, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Transportation & Infrastructure

This fact sheet synthesizes data on methods and accessibility of transportation for commuters in the Mountain West (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah). This fact sheet explores data from the most populous county in each state, using data originally provided by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. This dataset includes the type of transportation available (personal automobile, air travel, and maritime travel), the number of resident workers, the percent of these workers that commute to work, and the number of workers commuting within each county.

Is Uber Bad For The Environment?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Research finds Uber’s carbon footprint depended on the characteristics of individual cities

How American Transit Agencies Determine Fare Policy: It All Comes Down To Politics, Julian Thesseling

CMC Senior Theses

This paper will provide readers with an understanding of the variables that US transit agencies grapple with when developing fare policy, with a particular focus on the political process. The framework chapter will examine the objectives of public transportation and how agencies face difficulties in achieving these objectives. While this paper will focus on American transportation policy, the framework will draw from the experiences of cities across the world. Three case study chapters will then each discuss an American city or region’s approach to fare policy, and how variables have either complicated or enhanced agencies’ ability to develop effective fare …

Does “See Something, Say Something” Work?, Brian Michael Jenkins, Bruce R. Butterworth

Mineta Transportation Institute

Do “See Something, Say Something” programs work? The evidence strongly suggests that in the specific case of public surface transportation, the answer is “yes.” Transport staff and passengers play an important role in the prevention of terrorist attacks. By discovering and reporting suspicious objects, they have prevented more than 10 percent of all terrorist attacks on public surface transportation. Detection rates are even better in the economically advanced countries where more than 14 percent of the attempts are detected—and have been improving. This MTI Security Perspective analyzes detections since 1970 and suggests that “See Something, Say Something” campaigns are worthwhile.

How Much Do Users Value A Network Expansion? Evidence From The Public Transit System In Singapore, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming Liu

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

We estimate the network effects of a public transit system by examining the impact of its expansion on housing prices. Our results show that a major expansion of Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system increased the price of apartments within 0.5 km of a pre-expansion station by 1.8% relative to apartments that were further away from a station. Evaluated at the mean housing price, the expansion increased the value of pre-connected apartments by at least S$455 million in aggregate, which is equivalent to 9% of the estimated S$5 billion cost of the expansion.

Exploring Transit’S Contribution To Livability In Rural Communities: Case Studies Of The North Dakota Cities Of Valley City And Dickinson, Ranjit Godavarthy, Jeremy Mattson

Journal of Public Transportation

This paper investigates the nexus of transit and rural livability as demonstrated by case studies in the North Dakota communities of Valley City and Dickinson. While there are many factors that influence the livability of a rural community, transit is believed to be an important contributor. For each of the two North Dakota communities considered, public/resident surveys, local transit rider surveys, and stakeholder interviews were conducted to understand differing opinions on livability and how transit contributes to livability.

In both Valley City and Dickinson, surveys of residents showed that they believe affordable housing, low crime, quality healthcare, overall cost of …

How Much Do Users Value A Network Expansion? Evidence From The Public Transit System In Singapore, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming Liu

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

We estimate the network effects of a public transit system by examining the impact of its expansion on housing prices. Our results show that a major expansion of Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system increased the price of apartments within 0.5 km of a pre-expansion station by 1.8% relative to apartments that were further away from a station. Evaluated at the mean housing price, the expansion increased the value of pre-connected apartments by at least S$455 million in aggregate, which is equivalent to 9% of the estimated S$5 billion cost of the expansion.

Situation-Aware Authenticated Video Broadcasting Over Train-Trackside Wifi Networks, Yongdong Wu, Dengpan Ye, Zhuo Wei, Qian Wang, William Tan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Live video programmes can bring in better travel experience for subway passengers and earn abundant advertisement revenue for subway operators. However, because the train-trackside channels for video dissemination are easily accessible to anyone, the video traffic are vulnerable to attacks which may cause deadly tragedies. This paper presents a situation-aware authenticated video broadcasting scheme in the railway network which consists of train, on-board sensor, trackside GSM-R (Global System for Mobile Communications-Railway) device, WiFi AP (Access Point), and train control center. Specifically, the scheme has four modules: (1) a train uses its on-board sensors to obtain its speed, location, and RSSI …

Changes In Service And Associated Ridership Impacts Near A New Light Rail Transit Line, Jeongwoo Lee, Marlon Boarnet, Douglas Houston, Hilary Nixon, Steven Spears

Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning

Los Angeles (LA), for many years a city with limited rail transit, is substantially expanding its public transit system. This paradigm change in transportation policy and investment creates new requirements for monitoring. One area needing evaluation is whether new, high quality transit options, such as light rail, near existing transit services increase sustainable transportation mode shares and reduce car travel. Few studies have explored light rail’s role as a catalyst to increase overall transit use and achieve sustainability goals within an auto-oriented city like LA. Metro’s data show that trips taken on its bus and rail system dropped overall by …

Smartphone Sensing Meets Transport Data: A Collaborative Framework For Transportation Service Analytics, Yu Lu, Archan Misra, Wen Sun, Huayu Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We advocate for and introduce TRANSense, a framework for urban transportation service analytics that combines participatory smartphone sensing data with city-scale transportation-related transactional data (taxis, trains etc.). Our work is driven by the observed limitations of using each data type in isolation: (a) commonly-used anonymous city-scale datasets (such as taxi bookings and GPS trajectories) provide insights into the aggregate behavior of transport infrastructure, but fail to reveal individual-specific transport experiences (e.g., wait times in taxi queues); while (b) mobile sensing data can capture individual-specific commuting-related activities, but suffers from accuracy and energy overhead challenges due to usage artefacts and lack …

Identifying Key Factors Of Rail Transit Service Quality: An Empirical Analysis For Istanbul, Erkan Isikli, Nezir Aydin, Erkan Celik, Alev Taskin Gumus

Journal of Public Transportation

Providing a high quality of service in public transportation is essential to reduce dissatisfactions stemming from traffic congestion and noise. Public transport providers need to find ways to dilute the effects of immoderate use of private cars in big cities while maintaining a sufficient level of customer satisfaction. This study aimed to identify the key service quality (SQ) factors that drive passenger satisfaction in Istanbul’s rail transit (RT) system using data obtained from an extensive survey conducted by the Istanbul Public Transportation Co. A total of 11,116 passengers who used rail transport from May 15–June 3, 2012, and June 17–July …

Bus Transit Operational Efficiency Resulting From Passenger Boardings At Park-And-Ride Facilities, John S. Niles, J. M. Pogodzinski

Mineta Transportation Institute

In order to save time and money by not driving to an ultimate destination, some urban commuters drive themselves a few miles to specially designated parking lots built for transit customers and located where trains or buses stop. The focus of this paper is the effect Park-and-Ride (P&R) lots have on the efficiency of bus transit as measured in five bus transit systems in the western U.S. This study describes a series of probes with models and data to find objective P&R influence measures that, when combined with other readily-available data, permit a quantitative assessment of the significance of P&R …

Improving Pathways To Transit For Persons With Disabilities, Stephanie Dipetrillo, Andrea Lubin, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Carla Salehian, Stephen Gibson, Kristen William, Theodore Trent Green

Mineta Transportation Institute

Persons with disabilities can achieve a greater degree of freedom when they have full access to a variety of transit modes, but this can only be achieved when the pathways to transit – the infrastructure and conditions in the built environment – allow full access to transit stops, stations, and vehicles. Since passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, many transit agencies and governmental jurisdictions have made significant progress in this area. Policy initiatives, incremental enhancements, modifications, and other measures undertaken by transit agencies and their partners have significantly improved access to transit for persons with disabilities, …

The Benefits Of Transit In The United States: A Review And Analysis Of Benefit-Cost Studies, Christopher E. Ferrell

Mineta Transportation Institute

This white paper presents the findings from a review and analysis of the available literature on benefit-cost (b-c) estimates of existing U.S. transit systems. Following an inventory of the literature, the b-c estimates from each study were organized according to the type of study area (e.g., rural, small urban, urban, etc.). Through this process, categories of monetary transit benefits were identified. The estimated dollar value for each benefit category was divided by the total estimated costs of providing the transit services, thus creating a benefit-specific b-c ratio for each category and allowing benefits from each study to be compared on …

Changes In Transit Use And Service And Associated Changes In Driving Near A New Light Rail Transit Line, Mti Report 12-44, Hilary Nixon, Marlon Boarnet, Doug Houston, Steven Spears

Mineta Transportation Institute

Los Angeles is pursuing possibly the most ambitious rail transit investment program in the nation with plans to open six new rail transit lines between now and 2019. The report provides policy makes and planners a better understanding of the potential impacts of Los Angeles Metro’s rail transit investment program by assessing the changes in transit use of nearby residents and nearby bus service associated with the Expo Line, the first of the six new lines. Our findings indicate that changes in bus service that are coincident with the introduction of new light rail transit can negatively affect the overall …