Project: #170 Can Ridesharing Help the Disadvantaged Get Moving? Progress Report - Reporting Period Ending: Sept. 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: Sept. 29, 2019, 5:11 p.m.) % Project Completed to Date: 25 % Grant Award Expended: 50 % Match Expended & Document: 0 USDOT Requirements Accomplishments As noted in the rest of our documentation, this project will implement a randomized controlled trial in the Pittsburgh area, testing whether the provision of additional mobility to low-income Pittsburgh area mothers without good access to cars (by giving a randomly selected group of such mothers access to ridehailing services) raises their incomes and well-being and that of their families. There have been a number of significant accomplishments over the past 6 months. Over the summer of 2019, we were able to finalize months of negotiation between CMU and Uber and sign the final contract which enables us to partner with Uber. We also received CMU IRB approval for our project, and we have essentially completed the development of the custom software we will use for this project. We have begun the pilot phase of our study and are now in the process of recruiting low-income mothers in Allegheny County for participation in our pilot study. Over the next two months, a small number of Allegheny County mothers will be able to use the information and mobility resources provided by our project to find better jobs or work more hours. Provided the pilot phase goes well, we will scale up our intake of new participants towards the end of the year. Over the past 6 months, this project has provided training and professional development opportunities to multiple Carnegie Mellon graduate students who have worked as research assistants on the project. This group includes two Heinz College doctoral students, three Heinz College MISM masters students, two Heinz College MSPPM masters students, and a School of Computer Science masters student. Because the experimental phase is just beginning, there are no results yet to report. In the next 6 months, we plan to complete the pilot phase of our project, which will begin to implement the study with a small number of mothers (10-15) to ensure that all of our technology and procedures work as expected in the field. Provided that we encounter no major problems in the first two months or so, we will begin to scale up to the full study, inducting 50-100 mothers per month until we reach our target sample size of 650 mothers, with equal division into treatment and control groups. We will continue to employ 3-6 research assistants on the project throughout the next reporting period. 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. As we implement the study in the coming months, we look forward to sharing our results with the scientific community. Other Our project has developed the software tools referred to in earlier sections. Outcomes New Partners N/A Issues N/A