It’s something every bus rider fears: Their bus is running late.

Under typical conditions, Seattle has some of the most congested traffic in the nation. To prepare for when things return to normal, 91探花 researchers are carrying out a research project to investigate reasons for these delays.

While a bus could be late for many reasons, one holdup is that it has to compete with other vehicles 鈥� personal vehicles, ride-hailing cars, delivery trucks, etc. 鈥� that might be parked at the bus stop or double-parked in a travel lane.

People riding the bus have the prime seat to witness potential events like this. That’s why 91探花researchers are inviting the public to share their experiences on their regular commutes in . This project hopes to identify areas in Seattle and Bellevue where buses are frequently delayed by other vehicles and categorize the most common types of interference. From there, the researchers plan to develop potential solutions for these issues.

“Delays slow transit down and make it less attractive relative to driving,” said co-lead researcher , a 91探花associate professor of civil and environmental engineering who also leads the Sustainable Transportation Lab. “Some delays are necessary 鈥� such as waiting for passengers to board or pausing to make sure it’s safe to reenter traffic. But we suspect there may be cases where interference is happening. Are there cars or delivery trucks parked in the bus lane? Is there a cyclist, who for lack of a better space to ride, is in the bus lane? These are the kind of things we want to know about.”

The survey will ask people to fill out a few questions about where and when they notice problems and what types of interference they see.

Using the results from the survey and input from the project’s stakeholders, the team will identify up to 10 busy transit corridors 鈥� sections of a public transit route that may include multiple stops 鈥� to study in more detail. The group plans to develop an app so that research assistants can ride buses in the selected corridors to collect data on bus operation and mark cases of interference as they come up. Depending on the results, researchers will develop and test potential solutions.

“We’re really excited about learning what the problems are and hearing what the public has to say,” said co-lead researcher , a research engineer at the 91探花. “This is an opportunity for us to engage the public in our work and for them to influence our research to solve long-term transportation problems in their cities. We recognize that many people are working from home right now, but we would value any comments about their usual commutes.”

This research is sponsored by Challenge Seattle, Amazon, Uber, Sound Transit, King County Metro, Bellevue Transportation Department and the Seattle Department of Transportation with support from the 91探花.

For more information, contact Ranjbari at ranjbari@uw.edu.

In October 2014, Seattle launched Pronto, a docked bike-share program. But Pronto had problems shifting into a higher gear, and the city ended the program in 2017, making Seattle one of the few cities in the world to shut down a modern public bike sharing system.

Then, four months later, Seattle became the first city in the U.S. to allow for dockless bike sharing, a system where bikes don’t have to be picked up or returned to specific docking stations.

91探花 transportation researchers took this opportunity to look into why Pronto failed while dockless bike sharing has been so successful. The researchers used multiple approaches to consider 11 possible factors behind the difference in bike sharing outcomes: They surveyed Seattle bike riders, read press reports, analyzed ridership data and interviewed experts involved in both Pronto and dockless bike sharing in Seattle.

The team Sept. 26 in the journal Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice.

“We wanted to know if the problems Pronto had were intrinsic to Seattle, like our wet weather, our hills or our helmet laws. Or if they reflected decisions made by the bike sharing system designers 鈥� like the price of a ride or bike location and density across the city,” said senior author , a 91探花associate professor of civil and environmental engineering who also leads the leads the UW’s Sustainable Transportation Lab.

Some of the findings include:

• Pronto bikes weren’t always in areas that people wanted to go. Many neighborhoods that have high dockless ridership 鈥� Alki Point, Ballard, Wallingford, etc. 鈥� did not have Pronto docking stations.

• Pronto had a smaller number of bikes per square mile. It launched with 500 bikes 鈥� 50 stations 鈥� spread over 5 square miles. Dockless bike sharing launched with 1,000 bikes spread over Seattle’s 84 square miles. By the end of the first year, there were 9,000 dockless bikes, owned by three private companies, across the city.
• Pronto was perceived as “moderately difficult” to use, whereas dockless bikes were perceived as easy to use. For example, Pronto users had to go through multiple steps at the docking station 鈥� selecting a bike, renting a helmet, paying by credit card 鈥� to check out a bike whereas dockless bike users open their app, scan a QR code on a bike and start their trip.
• Pronto was more expensive 鈥� $8 per day with no per-ride option 鈥� compared to dockless bikes, at about $1 per ride.

To the team, the success of the dockless bike-share programs isn’t necessarily due to the fact that they are dockless, but rather the fact that these bikes had a higher density throughout the city and were more accessible for new users.

Dockless bikes, however, do have some advantages over their docked cousins: They can be dropped off anywhere, their set-up cost is likely to be about 80% cheaper than docked bikes, and companies can move them around the city based on how people are using them.

“These results can help service providers and cities better design and regulate bike- or scooter-sharing systems to increase ridership,” MacKenzie said. “One of the main implications from our study is that service providers should deploy at scale. A system that covers a large area and has plenty of bikes 鈥� or stations 鈥� is a system that will provide the greatest utility to travelers, and will achieve the highest ridership. For jurisdictions that aren’t ready to commit to a permanent, large-scale deployment, dockless may have an advantage for a temporary deployment because it doesn’t require costly investments in docks. Finally, policymakers should ensure that shared bikes or scooters can be picked up and dropped off in the places people want to travel.”

Luke Peters, who completed this research while a master’s student in the civil and environmental engineering department, is a co-author on this paper. This research was funded by a fellowship from the .

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For more information, contact MacKenzie at dwhm@uw.edu.

Many Americans use a ride-hailing service 鈥� like Uber or Lyft 鈥� to get to and from work. It provides the privacy of riding in a personal car and the convenience of catching up on emails or social media during traffic jams. In the future, self-driving vehicles could provide the same service, except without a human driver.

But would consumers be willing to ride in a driverless car?

Researchers at the 91探花 studied how Americans’ perceived cost of commute time changes depending on who’s driving. Through a survey, the team found that people considered a ride-hailing service at least 13% “less expensive,” in terms of time, compared to driving themselves. If the researchers told people the ride-hailing service was driverless, however, then the cost of travel time increased to 15% more than driving a personal car, suggesting that at least for now, people would rather drive themselves than have an autonomous vehicle drive them.

The team Aug. 6 in the journal .

“The idea here is that ‘time is money,’ so the overall cost of driving includes both the direct financial costs and the monetary equivalent of time spent traveling,” said senior author , a 91探花associate professor of civil and environmental engineering who also leads the UW’s Sustainable Transportation Lab. “The average person in our sample would find riding in a driverless car to be more burdensome than driving themselves. This highlights the risks of making forecasts based on how people say they would respond to driverless cars today.”

The team set up a survey that asked people across the continental U.S. to select between a personal car or a ride-hailing service for a 15-mile commute trip. Half the 502 respondents were told that the ride-hailing service was driverless.

The researchers converted the responses to a score of how much respondents deemed that trip would cost per hour.

“If someone values their trip time at $15 per hour, that means they dislike an hour spent traveling as much as they dislike giving up $15,” said co-author , a research engineer at the UW’s . “So a lower number means that the time spent traveling for that trip is less burdensome.”

On average, respondents preferred a ride-hailing service over driving themselves: Ride-hailing services scored at $21 an hour and driving scored $25 an hour. In addition, if the researchers reminded respondents they could multitask during a ride-hailing service ride, their perceived cost of travel time decreased even more to $13 per hour.

Technically a ride-hailing service should be equally as convenient regardless of whether a human or an autonomous car is driving, but respondents disagreed. Driverless ride-hailing services scored at $28 an hour.

These results make sense, according to the team. Driverless cars aren’t commercially available yet, so people are not familiar with them or may be leery of the technology.

“We believe that our respondents are telling us that if they were riding in an automated vehicle today, they would be sufficiently stressed out by the experience that it would be worse than driving themselves,” MacKenzie said. “This is a reminder that automated vehicles will need to offer benefits to consumers before people will adopt them. To a first approximation, a ride-hailing service with driverless cars would need to offer services at a price at least $7 per hour less than human-driven cars, to make the driverless service more attractive.”

Jingya Gao, an analyst at Amazon China who completed this research as a student in a dual master’s program at the 91探花and Tongji University, is also a co-author on this paper. This research was funded by the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center.

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For more information, contact MacKenzie at dwhm@uw.edu.

While many Puget Sound residents have to choose between taking public transit or personal vehicles to work, Microsoft and Seattle Children’s Hospital employees have an additional option: private commuter buses.

Last year, King County Metro and the Seattle Department of Transportation that allowed these shuttles to . But some residents are concerned that sharing stops with private shuttles could make public transit less reliable.

Now from researchers at the 91探花 suggests that public buses are unaffected by private shuttles most of the time. The study, which will appear in the print edition of the this fall, examined how well public buses adhered to their schedules both before and during the pilot period.

“There’s this huge symbolic meaning that these private buses have, and their potential impact on public transit would basically be salt in the wound,” said , a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering. “Your neighborhood is gentrified, your friends and neighbors have been forced to move out and now your bus is going to be late? But we found that, by and large, the buses aren’t running behind.”

To determine if the shuttles negatively impacted public buses’ reliability, MacKenzie and civil and environmental engineering doctoral student partnered with , a company that acquires and cleans up real-time performance data from trackers on public transit.

Lewis and MacKenzie used data for the six weeks leading up to the pilot start date on April 24, 2017, and then six weeks afterward for nine stops included in the trial run. The stops spanned the city, including stops in West Seattle, lower Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, and northeast Seattle. The team compared data from those stops to nearby control stops that were not part of the program, which was set to run for six months.

“We asked questions like: To what degree are buses arriving late? And does that change after the pilot starts?” said MacKenzie, who also leads the at the UW. “We’re interested in what happens in the worst-case scenarios before and after to see if the worst case gets worse. If buses start arriving 10 minutes late, that’s really problematic.”

On average, bus reliability stayed the same for all of the stops combined. But when the researchers looked at each stop individually, one stop on Sand Point Way in northeast Seattle was affected. The bus that stops there, the 75, was more likely to arrive two to three minutes later after the pilot program started.

It’s hard to tell exactly what’s happening at that stop without a more in-depth look, the researchers said.

“We wanted to do a quick study with data that’s available to see if there was an overall problem with the pilot program,” said Lewis, who is the corresponding author on the paper. “So rather than the city having to spend time and resources going out and having someone sit and watch every single stop, now they can follow up with only the problem stops.”

From a transportation standpoint, Seattle could benefit from having these private shuttles use public transit stops, the researchers said.

“These companies pay a monthly fee to stop, pick up and drop off passengers there,” said Lewis. “So they have the potential to add a new source of income that goes into improving the transit system.”

The team is optimistic that the results show that having access to real-time data like this can answer important questions that will help influence public policy.

“This is just one example of how open data can help us understand the impacts of these services, but there are certainly more questions,” said Lewis. “If we want to get at bigger questions, such as whether these shuttles are causing gentrification, then we need access to more available data.”

, founder and CEO of , was the team’s partner at Swiftly and is also a co-author on this paper.

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For more information, contact MacKenzie at: dwhm@uw.edu.

The lab is conducting a short, voluntary of cyclists to find out what they鈥檙e looking for from a bike share program.

鈥淲e鈥檙e interested in anybody who is a Seattle cyclist, especially if they鈥檝e used either of the systems,鈥� said Luke Peters, a 91探花graduate student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. 鈥淓ven if they didn鈥檛 use bike share, we want to know why they didn鈥檛 use it.鈥�

The survey asks various questions about general bike usage and the two styles of bike sharing programs that have been used in Seattle. Seattle has had a bike system fail and then be replaced. Pronto Cycle Share, which relied on docking stations at fixed locations, shut down in March 2017 before being replaced by the system in use today, a free-floating program where users unlock bikes via mobile apps. Three companies now offer free-floating bike rentals in Seattle: LimeBike, Spin and ofo.

Peters hopes the results of the research, which includes the survey and interviews with stakeholders, will help Seattle and other cities implementing bike-sharing programs.

Survey participants will be entered to win a bike bag from Swift Industries, a Seattle cycling gear manufacturer (a $160 value). The survey is up through March 16.

More information can be found at the Sustainable Transportation Lab’s 聽or by contacting Luke Peters at carl.luke.peters@gmail.com or 608-235-8377, or Don MacKenzie at dwhm@uw.edu or 206-685-7198.