We are excited to announce that our team has received a three-year, $1.44 million NSF grant to design, develop, deploy, and evaluate a marketplace and a mobile app for multimodal mobility, as part of our PittSmartLiving project. The marketplace will, for example, provide personalized incentives for people to take a later bus if the next one is full. The mobile app will enable multimodal trip planning, where for example part of the trip is done by bus and part of the trip is done by taking a HealthyRide bicycle or a Pitt Shuttle.
The funding will also allow us to place an additional 10-15 multimodal real-time transportation information screens in Pittsburgh. These will supplement the half-dozen locations in Oakland and Downtown already deployed in collaboration with TransitScreen, a DC-based company providing displays of real-time information. The pilot project was paid for through seed funding from the University of Pittsburgh.
Principal investigators are project leader Alexandros Labrinidis, project co-leader Konstantinos Pelechrinis, Adam J. Lee, and Yu-Ru Lin of the School of Computing and Information; Sera Linardi of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs; and Kent Harries and Mark Magalotti of the Swanson School of Engineering.
In addition to TransitScreen, we are excited to collaborate with the Port Authority of Allegheny County, Healthy Ride, the City of Pittsburgh, Oakland Business Improvement District, the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, Envision Downtown, the Oakland Transportation Management Association, Pittsburgh 2030 District, Radius Networks, UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh Department of Parking, Transportation & Services, the University of Pittsburgh Office of Community and Governmental Relations, the University of Pittsburgh Center for Social & Urban Research, and Daniele Quercia, Head of the Social Dynamics team at Bell Labs, Cambridge UK.
More information about the project can be found at https://pittsmartliving.org. For news and updates, you can also follow us on twitter (@PittSmartLiving) and Facebook (@PittSmartLiving), or you can check out one of the project’s screens in Oakland and Downtown Pittsburgh.