Sevgi Erdogan

The paper addresses a critical research gap in the literature by focusing on the identification of service areas for microtransit. It presents a framework for identifying areas where microtransit would have a higher potential for success. The primary objective is to assist agencies in their efforts to provide microtransit services by offering a robust and flexible decision-making framework. This framework serves as an intermediate step between an initial planning study that identifies candidate zones and a detailed feasibility study, which is currently missing in the literature. The framework is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) process that can be applicable to various contexts. Specifically, our approach utilizes a lexicographic decision rule for ranking microtransit service priority measures for each census block of a selected region, such as a county. We employ two composite measures for ranking: Microtransit Propensity Index (MPI) and Weighted Accessibility Score (WAS). The latter combines transit access to work and to eight points of interest (POIs). This framework can be adapted to identify zones suitable for microtransit service based on different objectives, such as connecting residents to transit centers, providing first- and last-mile connections, providing services in transit deserts, providing flexible transit service to low-income communities, or providing access to the POIs within a zone. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is evaluated using the case of Prince George’s County in Maryland. The results reveal that our approach provides greater insights into the feasibility of an area for microtransit compared with relying solely on a single index such as MPI.

This paper introduces an innovative way to incentivize increased person throughput on priced highway facilities such as toll roads, express toll lanes, and high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes, using cash rewards for carpoolers and transit riders. An exploratory evaluation of the concept is demonstrated for the I-66 HOT facility inside the Capital Beltway in Northern Virginia. The results of the analysis suggest that the concept could provide significant benefits at a relatively low cost to public agencies for cash incentives.