Due to transportation technologies having such heterogeneous impacts on different communities, there needs to be better tools to evaluate the deployment of emerging technologies with limited data. Microtransit is one such technology.

We propose a novel methodology to “upscale” the limited data available so that further decision-support analysis and forecast modelling can be achieved where none could prior. The methodology involves extending an initial day-to-day adjustment process to handle both first/last mile access trips and direct trips, updating a within-day microtransit simulator with a parametric design, and developing a scenario generation process.

The method is tested in a case study with data from Via for Salt Lake City, Austin, Cupertino, Sacramento, Columbus, and Jersey City showing an average 18% ridership error for the market equilibrium models. Data from four of those cities are upscaled to 326 scenarios to estimate forecast models for ridership and fleet vehicle-miles-traveled using Lasso regularization. The models have root mean squared error (RMSE) values between 37-45% of the averages, whereas using only four cities’ data would not produce any forecast model at all. The results show that variables with statistically significant positive impact on ridership and negative impact on vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) include zones with more transit stops, higher employment, but lower “employment density × fixed fare.”

The models are then used to identify two alternative portfolios with similar fleet VMT as the original four cities but are forecast to have up to 1.9 times the ridership.

Joseph Chow is an Institute Associate Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Civil and Urban Engineering Department with affiliations at CUSP and Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management.

He is an NSF CAREER award recipient, a former Canada Research Chair, and the co-founding Deputy Director of the C2SMART transportation center at NYU. He is the Chair of the Subcommittee on Route Choice & Spatiotemporal Behavior at TRB. He has published about 70 journal articles since 2010 and is an editor for three transportation journals including Transportation Research Part B.

Dr. Chow received his PhD (’10) at UC Irvine and his MEng (’01) and BS (’00) at Cornell University.

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