Multidisciplinary Team Receives National Science Foundation Funding to Improve Transit [Pittwire]

A multidisciplinary team of Pitt investigators has received a three-year, $1.44 million NSF grant to build and evaluate a marketplace and a mobile app for multimodal transportation. The marketplace will provide incentives such as discounts at nearby businesses to encourage riders to take a later bus if the next one is full.

The funding will enable the Pitt Smart Living Project to place additional multimodal, realtime transportation information screens around the city. A half-dozen screens are located in Oakland and Downtown in collaboration with TransitScreen, through seed funding from the University.

Read more: Pittwire Accolades article

PittSmartLiving project gets $1.44 million from the National Science Foundation

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.

PittSmartLiving pilot project started

Seed funding for the PittSmartLiving project was provided by the University of Pittsburgh (Office of the Vice Provost for Research) in the Fall of 2016. The goal of the pilot study was to evaluate the benefits of making real­time transportation information available to city­ dwellers and also the potential impact of incentives as a way to encourage pro­social behavior.