Equitable Access to Transit—Case Study of Transportation Network Company (TNC) Users in Chicago

Abstract

To best serve their communities, public-sector transportation agencies need better information about the degree to which these new mobility services complement or substitute publicly provided fixed-route mass transit service. A lack of information on transportation network company (TNC) usage is a significant barrier to efficient transportation planning and decision-making. This paper addresses the need for detailed TNC use data by developing a method to identify TNC trips, TNC drivers, and TNC passengers based on mobile device data. To this goal, the researchers have collected TNC pickup and drop-off information from city of Chicago data portal. The research team has developed a metric to define “equitable access” to transit for the TNC users. The metric is tested using the TNC database and comparable transit trips as queried from OpenTrip Planner 2 software. The team has compared how TNC drivers and passengers differ in terms of transit richness (transit service density) and in terms of transit supportiveness (housing and employment density). This paper includes numeric measures of complementarity and competition among TNC and public transit providers. The competition is defined by determining what trips were taken via TNC that could have been served with existing transit service. The TNC users are classed into two major groups—the group which had adequate spatio-temporal access to transit vs. the group that had inadequate access.