One year in to our transportation job access program, here are our 3 top lessons

Since winning the $1M Bloomberg Mayors Challenge and launching our current transportation-as-a-benefit pilot, the City of South Bend’s Commuters Trust team has been talking to dozens of players in the mobility innovation space. This field moves fast and things are always changing! We’re constantly distilling lessons, not only from our work, but also from other projects happening across the U.S.

Here are three things on the forefront of our minds as we wrap up our first complete year in the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge, combining what we’ve learned from our own project and others like ours:

1. Communities are trying to solve many types of transportation challenges. Honing in on one problem — job access for hourly wage workers — gives us time and space to do one thing well. There are many transportation access issues to pick from — for example, access to medical care (see Grand Rapid’s health access program), access to education (see the Kresge Foundation’s recent investments), or access to food (see Indianapolis’ food access program). Our program solves a specific problem around access to employment. And furthermore, we’ve honed in on the employer as our primary customer, since we envision the employer helping to pay for this program. This focus clarifies our model and helps us manage trade-offs in our decision making.
2. Practices from Transportation Demand Management (TDM) can improve transportation access programs. The goal of TDM — how policy and strategy can reduce or redistribute travel demand — typically has to do with mitigating congestion and climate concerns. A key part of this work is shifting user behavior away from single occupancy vehicle trips (see Durham, NC’s Mayors Challenge project or the recently-launched ArriveRochester in Rochester, MN). While our work on transportation access has a different objective, we plan to leverage some of the behavioral insight lessons from TDM to help encourage our users to take the most cost-effective and efficient modes of shared transportation.
3. Public transit remains a key part of sustainable solutions. The overwhelming majority of our conversations with other communities lead us back to a recurring conclusion: a financially sustainable service will rely on public transit infrastructure. History is still being written on the cases of municipalities trying to substitute private-sector solutions for public transit, but there are several cautionary tales (see Innisfil, Canada’s story here). That said, many other communities are thinking creatively about how to leverage excess capacity in the public transit fleet (see SafeShift in Pittsburgh) or how investments might make transit better able to integrate with new on-demand approaches (see Sioux Falls, SD). In South Bend, we are intentional about finding ways to best leverage Transpo fixed-route bus service in our program.

Beyond those programs cited above, we’re also closely tracking parallel projects including the Ohio-based Paradox Prize program and the work similar to ours coming out of Detroit’s Office of Mobility Innovation.

And in the spirit of collaboration, we’re planning to share our learnings along the way!

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