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AUSTIN, Texas – Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are teaming up with the City of Austin to provide more transportation options in Georgian Acres, a neighborhood in northeast Austin considered a “desert of transit”.
The term, coined by Junfeng Jiao, associate professor in the Community and Regional Planning program, means that the region has more demand for transportation than is available. The new project will help solve this problem by building a smart mobility hub on Wonsley Drive near Gessner Drive, just off Interstate 35 and US 183.
The hub will have bus stops, electric scooters, and pickup and drop-off points for carpools. It will also have resources such as an on-site health clinic and a pantry. The team recently received a $ 1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to help pay.
“At the start of this project, we reached out to residents of the Georgian Acres neighborhood and asked them what they wanted to see in their community, rather than telling them what we were planning to build,” Jiao said. “We wanted to make sure the hub was customized to meet their specific needs. “
In addition to providing transportation options in the Georgian Acres neighborhood, the project will also help provide jobs for those recently released from custody who are looking for work. The research team has partnered with the nonprofit Jail to Jobs, which will hire two people to drive circulating buses through the neighborhood to get residents to their apartments and grocery stores, improving l ‘access to food in an area also considered a food desert. Capital Metro provides the buses.
“We are literally saving their lives, taking them off the streets and teaching them a skill that can change the rest of their lives,” said Jeremias Cooper, director of Jail to Jobs in Travis County.
UT’s research team, which includes faculty members from public affairs, information and economics, identified the location of the mobility hub through a data-driven process examining the travel patterns, mobility infrastructure such as bus and bike routes, and socioeconomic status to see the demand on neighborhood-by-neighborhood transportation systems in Austin.
“Georgian Acres is bounded on all sides by freeways and high speed roads, making it difficult for community members to move in or out of the neighborhood,” said Alex Payson of Austin Transportation’s Smart Mobility office. . “It’s also a traditionally low to moderate income community, which means affordability is a significant barrier to transportation for these people. We hope that this community hub project will provide a variety of affordable transportation options, allowing community members to choose the modes that best meet their needs.
Researchers working on the project are involved in UT’s great challenge known as Good Systems, whose goal is to design artificial intelligence technologies that benefit society. The project aligns with its goals of building smarter cities that use data and information to help governments provide better service to residents.
The project is designed in such a way that it can be implemented in other parts of the city, while providing resources specific to this area. It could also inform how the city and Capital Metro decide to develop their future transportation hubs as part of Project Connect, the new transit plan that includes a light rail system.
“What we’re working on is something relatively new,” said Jason JonMichael, deputy director of Austin Transportation. “The regional traffic models that UT is working on help us understand the demand on the transportation system today and in the future. No one has ever gone deep into the neighborhoods to understand this. We are delighted that the NSF has the vision that this is a particular area where we need further research and development. “
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