You probably don’t live, work, socialize, go to school, and receive health care all in the same place. To get where you need to go in your day-to-day life, you need some form of transportation to get there. But what if that transportation is unavailable? It stands to reason that not being able to get where you need to go would have detrimental effects on your well-being.

To identify transportation disadvantages in their respective cities, professors from the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Arizona, and the University of Tennessee teamed up to design and test a travel diary app called MyAmble. Travel diaries are built for recording trips taken, but they often lack the ability to capture travel disadvantage or latent travel demand. In this context, travel disadvantage refers to essential trips that people plan to take but are unable to complete for some reason, e.g., their car breaks down or they don’t have gas money. Latent travel demand refers to trips that people would take but don’t bother to plan due to transportation barriers or safety concerns. The aim of MyAmble was to document trips taken as well as travel disadvantage and latent travel demand; reasons for the latter two; and real-time perceived impacts of transportation behaviors of the participants. The dataset created by MyAmble could help inform the designs of transportation systems that promote rather than restrict access to opportunities, creating a more equitable city that benefits all citizens.

The research team asked four questions:

•  What is the transferability of MyAmble among lower-income and marginalized individuals in three states to collect data related to longitudinal, daily transportation activities, trip patterns, and health and well-being? (For a transportation activity to be longitudinal, it must be collected multiple times from the same individual over time. For example, going to work five days a week would be a longitudinal activity, but going to see your primary care physician for a yearly checkup would not be a longitudinal activity.)
• What is the efficacy of MyAmble in a smartphone mode of delivery?
• What are the key components necessary for general adoption and use of MyAmble (e.g., user training, digital interface)?
• What is the quality and usability of data showing how types of trips (completed, missed, and latent) associate with physical health, mental health, psycho-social well-being, and economic opportunities for underserved and marginalized populations?

To answer these questions, a mixed-methods design was used to gather data. First, researchers conducted focus groups with nineteen people from Texas, Tennessee, and Arizona. The participants were an assortment of field experts and potential app users who were all testing the app to make sure it worked properly. Results of the focus groups led to the app being improved.

Then MyAmble was distributed to seventy-seven participants from the same three states, and the participants used the app for fourteen days. Over that period of time, they had several ways they could interact with the app. Along with a daily trip planner—a staple feature of travel diaries—MyAmble also gave users the options to use Travel Buddy, Challenge Logger, or Travel Story. Travel Buddy paired app users with grad students who would send the users personalized questions to collect qualitative data that was more in-depth than what the daily trip planner provided. Challenge Logger allowed users to take photos and videos of transportation barriers that they encountered, and GPS data was linked to that media for further analysis. Travel Story asked users a series of premade, open-ended questions that allowed for contextualization of the participants’ lived experiences with transportation.

Overall, the app served its basic function as a travel diary app, and it also proved to be good at capturing unfulfilled travel desires. Travel Buddy revealed that transportation safety and neighborhood safety were key factors in not taking trips even when resources were available. For many users, rideshare was preferable to public transportation because it saved time. On one hand, rideshare saved time because public transportation tended to be slow; on the other hand, rideshare saved time because it got riders right to the doorsteps of their destinations in a way that public transportation often doesn’t (for example, if the closest bus stop to your destination is a mile away, so you’d have to walk that mile or get an Uber to get there anyway). Challenge Logger was not often used by users, which suggests that it may need to be updated; only six users submitted photos, though the photos submitted did detail transportation struggles. Nineteen users answered at least one question from Travel Story.

A usability survey and a post-MyAmble focus group were conducted that revealed users’ overall satisfaction with the app. A few potential tweaks include adding more activity designation options on the daily trip planner (13 percent of trip activities were designated by users as “other” rather than “library,” “food,” “bank,” etc.), implementing reminders for users to use the app, and including items related to finance and budgeting. MyAmble is still in its early stages, but it shows great promise as a tool for policymakers to consider when making urban planning decisions. With MyAmble, users would be able to effectively voice their needs.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

App-based Data Collection to Characterize Latent Transportation Demand within Marginalized and Underserved Populations

Noelle Fields, University of Texas at Arlington; Stephen Mattingly, University of Texas at Arlington; David Levine, University of Texas at Arlington; Nicole Iroz-Elardo, University of Arizona; Courtney Cronley, University of Tennessee

• Download the Final Report (PDF)

This research was funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities, with additional support from the University of Texas at Arlington School of Social Work, Department of Civil Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Office of Research; the University of Tennessee, the University of Arizona, The Senior Source, Inc., and the State Fair of Texas/Big Texas.

Photo by Rawpixel/iStock

The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) is one of seven U.S. Department of Transportation national university transportation centers. NITC is a program of the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University. This PSU-led research partnership also includes the Oregon Institute of Technology, University of Arizona, University of Oregon, University of Texas at Arlington and University of Utah. We pursue our theme — improving mobility of people and goods to build strong communities — through research, education and technology transfer