Developing planning and forecasting tools for age-friendly rural and community transportation alternatives: a focus on volunteer driver programs to facilitate older person mobility and safety

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This proposed research program will study organized community transportation programs (such as volunteer driver programs) to develop scientific tools for the transportation engineering profession to support program planning, design, operation, and management to maximize utility in meeting safety and mobility needs of car-dependent older adults as they age.  The expected tripling of the Canadian population over the age of 65 years by 2056, and declining family sizes, suggests that “friends and family” cannot satisfy future transportation demand of older drivers as they transition to passengers. Community transportation programs offer a solution, but the collective body of knowledge surrounding community transportation programs is often case-study or anecdotal in nature.  There is a lack of scientific understanding of these programs with respect to their effectiveness for meeting mobility needs, their potential for success by location, their scalability to meet growth in demand, and their contribution to public safety by facilitating the transition of a medically-at-risk driver.  I propose formalizing the deployment of community-based transportation programs by studying them through a transportation engineering and planning lens. My short-term objectives over the next 5 years are focused on developing a foundation for incorporating the travel demand associated with a subset of community transportation programs, volunteer driver programs in particular, into transportation engineering and planning practice.  Four MScE students will assist me with completing the following four objectives: A.Develop an inventory of volunteer driver programs that is national in scope, focused on qualifying and quantifying their organizational and operational attributes. B.Identify critical success factors for program deployment and sustainability. C.Predict travel demand for a volunteer driver program.  D.Quantify the safety benefits of transitioning a medically-at-risk rural older driver to a volunteer driver program. The results of this work over the short and long term will create a body of knowledge surrounding community transportation systems that currently does not exist in a meaningful or systematic way.  It will move the development of community transportation alternatives from the domain of anecdotal operational development and planning to the transportation engineering domain, increasing the likelihood of success in meeting older people’s needs for safety and mobility