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距离创造就业机会集中的地区很远的地方，因此在他们的社区之外寻找工作时，会产生很高的交通成本(从时间和金钱上看)。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。这被称为空间不匹配问题，考虑到她们的育儿责任，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新的交通选择激增，这些选择提供了一些私人车辆的灵活性，而不需要支付高昂的车辆拥有固定成本。这些新的交通选择是否会显著扩大低收入母亲的地理和社会经济流动性？如果是这样的话，是如何做到的呢？为了探索这些可能性，该项目提出了一套现场实验，为治疗组提供低成本的这些交通选择，并将流动性和社会经济结果与对照组进行比较。这些实验可以使用现代智能手机中嵌入的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，该项目将衡量地理流动性增加对社会经济流动性的短期和长期影响。通过与不同的地区性非营利组织建立伙伴关系，该项目将直接让低收入母亲参与我们的研究设计。研究结果将为寻求为空间不匹配问题的实际政策和工程解决方案提供资金的政策制定者提供直接指导。鉴于这些交通选择在全国和世界各地的迅速传播，我们的研究得出的政策教训可能会在数百个城市实施，可能会影响数百万人的生活。这项研究还将支持区域交通系统建模的根本性突破。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可见性有限。通过利用通过我们提议的研究收集的详细数据，该项目将创建对这些区域交通系统进行建模的新方法。新的模型将反映传统公共交通与一系列互补的新(和旧)交通技术之间日益增长的互动。从这些模型中获得的知识可以进一步扩大公共交通的乘客量和居民的流动性，同时还可以促进环境的可持续性。该项目由公民创新挑战计划Track A.社区和移动性支持：通过NSF和能源汽车运输部办公室的合作，提供更好的移动性选择，以解决住房负担能力和工作之间的空间不匹配问题。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.