Project: #170 Can Ridesharing Help the Disadvantaged Get Moving? Progress Report - Reporting Period Ending: March 30, 2019 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: March 28, 2019, 2:41 p.m.) % Project Completed to Date: 20 % Grant Award Expended: 22 % 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 Mobility 21 funding to further the development of 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, which is now essentially complete, after a considerable degree of development effort in recent months, will allow participants to plan hybrid trips 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, and this has seen considerable development effort, too, especially in terms of making it more mobile-friendly. As soon as a contract is signed and our (revised) IRB protocol is approved, we plan to start our pilot study. Impacts While we do not yet have experimental results, the development activities described above have partly funded multiple masters and Ph.D. students at CMU, furthering the software development capabilities of the students and showing them how these tools can be deployed in social science research. We look forward to implementing our study in coming months. Other Our project has developed the software tools referred to in earlier sections. Outcomes New Partners N/A Issues As noted, complications in negotiating a contract between CMU and Uber have delayed project implementation. We expect implementation of the pilot to begin later this spring.