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 driving a car.

Carpooling on Steroids

This is carpooling on steroids, using far more advanced algorithms than the pooling apps offered by peer-to-peer ridehailing businesses. These services haven’t caught on because they slow down travel and deliver iffy results with “uncertain” added travel times.

The MIT app ingests all of the ride requests, the locations, the capacities of all vehicles, all possible trip combinations, and then determines the best assignment of vehicles and riders. The goal is to give transportation providers the ability to control and predict critical user experience factors like ride times and wait times so that travelers have both the convenience and certainty they desire.

The research also found that excess ride times would likely shrink over time, as getting more cars off the road would speed trip times due to reduced traffic. “The optimal combination of trips would have reduced total travel time by 40 percent,” researchers found, “with corresponding reductions in operational costs and carbon dioxide emissions.”

These results are similar to those of a study conducted by Bestmile, using our fleet orchestration platform that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to continually optimize fleet performance. The platform constantly monitors demand and allocates vehicles to optimize vehicle utilization and allows operators to deliver predictable service levels for passengers. Taking data from taxi trips in the Chicago metro area, this study found that 200 six-person vehicles could do the work of Chicago’s 2700 taxis with an average excess ride time of six minutes and a wait time of five minutes — about equal to the nine minutes Chicagoans spend looking for parking.

Public or Private

Public transport is defined as the “transport of passengers by group travel systems available for use by the general public.” In many cases, this transport is provided by government entities in cities. Private operators, however, also perform public transport, either as contractors with cities or as independent businesses. The services described here — app-based carpooling — could be provided by public agencies or by private businesses.

In the end, it doesn’t necessarily matter who or what entity owns the fleet and delivers the service. What matters for people living in and around growing cities is quality of life, and making public transport more convenient and efficient than personal autos by moving more people with fewer vehicles can impact this by reducing congestion and pollution.