Project: #170 Can Ridesharing Help the Disadvantaged Get Moving? Progress Report - Reporting Period Ending: Sept. 30, 2018 Principal Investigator: Lee Branstetter Status: Active Start Date: July 1, 2018 End Date: June 30, 2020 Research Type: Advanced Grant Type: Research Grant Program: FAST Act - Mobility National (2016 - 2022) Grant Cycle: 2018 Mobility21 UTC Progress Report (Last Updated: Sept. 28, 2018, 9:54 a.m.) % Project Completed to Date: 15 % Grant Award Expended: 0 % Match Expended & Document: 0 USDOT Requirements Accomplishments Because of delays negotiating a contract between CMU and Uber, we have not yet been able to run the small scale pilot study we intended to fund with Mobilty 21 resources, nor have we been able to start the main study. Instead, we have spent the past several months using Metro21 funding to develop custom software for this project. Each participant in the study will be required to have a smartphone (so that she can contact Uber to request rides), and we have created a suite of apps that participants will be required to put on their smartphones. One component will track the GPS coordinates of our participants every 15 minutes, allowing us to measure the impact of ride-hailing on the mobility of our participants in a detailed, granular way. Another component will allow us to send short surveys to our study participants through their phones, hopefully raising response rates relative to conventional paper-based surveys. A third component, still under development, will allow participants to plan “hybrid trips” that combine Uber rides with public transportation, saving time relative to a mass-transit-only option while also saving money relative to an Uber-only option. Finally, a fourth component will help participants connect to regional services for job seekers, including on-line job search sites. We are holding the Mobility 21 funds in reserve so that we can use them to fund actual provision of ridesharing services to our study participants. Impacts While we do not yet have experimental results, the development activities described above have partly funded multiple masters and Ph.D. students at Carnegie Mellon University, furthering the software development capabilities of our students and showing them how these tools an be deployed in social science research. We have also made a number of public presentations describing the research design; it has been extremely well received with multiple constituencies. We look forward to implementation of our study in the coming months. Other Our project has developed the software tools referred to in earlier sections. Outcomes New Partners We have forged a productive partnership with Allegheny County DHS, which will allow us to more easily obtain a representative random sample of low-income single mothers for our study and track our participants' use of social services during and after the study period. Does our treatment lead to a decline in use of and need of social services because our participants see an increase in their income? This will be something we can study in the context of our research. Issues As noted, complications in negotiating a contract between CMU and Uber have delayed project implementation. We expect full implementation to begin no later than early spring semester, 2019.