How to Make Public Transport More Convenient Than Driving | by ...

How to Make Public Transport More Convenient Than Driving
Convenience is king when it comes to transportation choices. A study by ticketing software maker Masabi found that convenience is the number one influencer in peoples’ transportation choices — more important than cost. Transportation consultant Howard Jennings told commuter researchers at Mobility Lab about convenience, “if it’s not there, we can’t sell it.”
Driving vs. Public Transport
This explains why even though traffic and pollution in cities are as bad as ever, public transportation use continues to decline. In the United States, for example, 87 percent of daily trips take place in personal vehicles. Why aren’t more people getting on the bus or train to get to work or to get around town?
It’s all about convenience. Even with worsening traffic, driving still gets people to work faster — twice as fast in the U.S., a study by Governing found. A survey of licensed drivers in 15 countries found that 70 percent would use public transport if it was faster than driving.
Cities are growing — as soon as 2030 one in every three people will live in cities with at least half a million inhabitants. With bad traffic getting worse, can public transportation up its game to move people in and out of cities faster? Yes, according to a growing body of research. The answer is in ridesharing, not in the form of peer-to-peer ridehailing where a ride is booked for a single trip, but in the form of carpooling where multiple passengers share a vehicle.
Making It Work
Researchers at MIT took data from three million taxi rides in New York City and developed an algorithm that routes vehicles in real-time based on ride requests, and then proactively sends vehicles to the optimal locations to meet demand. Their computer models found that 3,000 four-passenger cars could serve 98 percent of trips made by New York City’s 14,000 taxis, with an average wait time of only 2.7 minutes and an increase trip time of 3.5 minutes. They also found that 2,000 ten-person vehicles could meet 95 percent of demand.
Considering that drivers in the city spend an average of 15 minutes looking for parking, and more time walking to their final destinations, these trips would indeed be faster than…