SCC-CIVIC-PG Track A: City of Bridges: Using New Transportation Options to Drive Low-Income Mothers to Greater Success in Pittsburgh

美国城市的低收入居民往往居住在远离就业机会集中的地区，因此，当他们在社区以外寻找工作时，会产生高昂的交通成本（在时间和金钱方面）。这些高昂的运输成本压低了收入，限制了就业，降低了社会经济流动性。这就是所谓的空间错配问题，考虑到父母的责任，这可能会给有年幼孩子的低收入母亲带来更大的挑战。虽然这个问题已经存在了几十年，但最近智能手机的广泛普及使得新的交通选择激增，这些选择提供了个人车辆的一些灵活性，同时又没有高昂的拥有车辆的固定成本。这些新的交通选择能显著扩大低收入母亲的地理和社会经济流动性吗？如果有，怎么做？为了探索这些可能性，本项目提出了一套实地实验，为治疗组提供低成本的交通选择，并将流动性和社会经济结果与对照组进行比较。这些实验可以使用嵌入现代智能手机的GPS功能来测量地理流动性增加的数量和性质，从而赋予治疗组中的低收入母亲。通过与地方政府机构的创新伙伴关系，该项目将在短期和长期内衡量地域流动性增加对社会经济流动性的影响。通过与不同地区的非营利组织合作，这个项目将直接让低收入母亲参与我们的研究设计。研究结果将为政策制定者提供直接的指导，以寻求为空间错配问题提供实际的政策和工程解决方案。鉴于这些交通选择在全国和世界各地的迅速扩散，我们的研究得出的政策经验可以在数百个城市实施，可能影响数百万人的生活。这项研究还将支持在区域交通系统建模方面取得根本性突破。交通研究人员目前对新的交通选择如何影响区域交通系统内的多式联运选择的了解有限。通过利用我们提出的研究中收集的详细数据，该项目将为这些区域交通系统的建模创造新的方法。新模式将反映传统公共交通与一系列互补的新（旧）交通技术之间日益增长的相互作用。从这些模型中获得的知识可以进一步扩大公共交通客流量和居民流动性，同时还可以促进环境的可持续性。该项目由美国国家科学基金会和能源部车辆运输办公室合作的公民创新挑战项目Track a支持：社区和机动性：提供更好的机动性选择，解决住房负担能力和工作之间的空间不匹配。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Low-income residents of American cities tend to live far from the districts where job creation is concentrated, and therefore incur high transportation costs (in terms of time and money) when seeking employment outside their neighborhoods. These high transportation costs depress income, limit employment, and lower socioeconomic mobility. This is known as the spatial mismatch problem, and it is likely to pose even bigger challenges for low-income mothers with young children, given their parental responsibilities. While this problem has existed for decades, the recent and widespread diffusion of smartphones has enabled a proliferation of new transportation options that offer some of the flexibility of personal vehicles without the high fixed cost of vehicle ownership. Could these new transportation options significantly expand the geographic and socioeconomic mobility of low-income mothers? If so, how? To explore these possibilities, this project proposes a set of field experiments which provide low-cost access to these transportation options for a treatment group and compare the mobility and socioeconomic outcomes to a control group. The experiments can use the GPS capabilities embedded in modern smartphones to measure the quantity and nature of increased geographic mobility thereby conferred on low-income mothers in the treatment groups. Through innovative partnerships with local government agencies, this project will measure the impact of increased geographic mobility on socioeconomic mobility in the short-run and the long-run. Through partnerships with a diverse set of regional nonprofits, this project will directly involve low-income mothers in our research design. The results of the research will provide immediate guidance for policymakers seeking to fund practical policy and engineering solutions to the spatial mismatch problem. Given the rapid diffusion of these transportation options across the country and around the world, policy lessons derived from our study could be implemented in hundreds of cities, potentially impacting the lives of millions. The research will also support fundamental breakthroughs in the modeling of regional transportation systems. Transportation researchers currently have limited visibility into how new transportation options are impacting multi-modal transit choices within regional transportation systems. By leveraging the detailed data collected through our proposed research, this project will create new methods for modeling these regional transportation systems. The new models will reflect the growing interaction between conventional mass transit and a range of complementary new (and old) transit technologies. The knowledge gained from these models could further expand mass transit ridership and resident mobility, while also promoting environmental sustainability. This project is supported by the CIVIC Innovation Challenge program Track A. Communities and Mobility: Offering Better Mobility Options to Solve the Spatial Mismatch Between Housing Affordability and Jobs through a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Energy Vehicle Transportation Office.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.