Stranded: Bridging the Transportation Gap for Rural Communities
While innovations in transportation tend to be viewed as a trend unique to urban communities and settings, new technologies are now enabling service providers to capitalize on a previously untapped market: rural communities. With a unique set of challenges and opportunities—and enabled by today’s technology—these rural markets allow transportation service providers to rethink the kinds of services they provide, how to scale those services, and how to make them more accessible. That movement toward innovation in rural markets needs to …
Demand-Driven Transportation: How Public and Private Competition Benefits Everyone
Whether traveling to work, a restaurant or coffee shop or even the hospital, consumers have more transportation options than ever before. And as both new and re-formulated technologies fuel the continued expansion of the local transportation market with new services and companies – both public and private – it’s easy to think that now is the best time to be a local commuter. Yet, at the same time, this expanding array of transportation services – ranging from city buses to …
The Original Rideshare: Public Transit in the Era of Uber
The idea of a group of people traveling together from Point A to Point B as a way to make transportation more efficient and more affordable isn’t exactly new. At LA Metro, we’ve been doing that with buses and trains for over 60 years. But in the age of ride-hailing (e.g., Uber and Lyft), the transportation landscape has dramatically changed, and today there are many more options to consider than there were in the 1950s. The concept of Mobility as …
Bringing the Convenience of Expedia to Paratransit
During the recent Thanksgiving holiday, a record 30 million-plus Americans traveled by air, and millions more will take to the skies before the clock strikes 2019. Notably, less than 10 percent of those travelers used a traditional travel agent to book their flights. Consumer travel planning has undergone a technological revolution. Today, the vast majority of travelers enjoy the convenience of online tools like Expedia or flight aggregators and metasearch engines, such as Google Flights, to explore flight options across …
The Devil is in the Details: Securely Sharing Transportation Data
Hacks. Leaks. Theft. Every week seems to have a new scandal about the misuse of data. Yet, data — and its sharing — are the lifeblood of many of the technological innovations we see across every major industry. How you shop, eat, and even make friends has been completely transformed by data-driven technologies. And transportation is no different. For transportation systems to work effectively, they need to both collect information about users and relay accurate information to those users. …
Threats to Infrastructure Funding Could Undermine Successful Local Development Efforts
Well-designed, transit-rich neighborhoods provide many benefits to residents of all ages, as I document in, “Independence Found in Downsizing to a Transit Rich Neighborhood.” These neighborhoods also provide dividends to the larger community, generating higher property values, rents, and revenue than real estate located further away from high quality public transportation services. Cities as diverse as Seattle, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Denver, Detroit, and Washington, DC have all strengthened their regional economies through investment in transit-oriented development (TOD). And because their residents …
