Mobility on Demand (MOD) Sandbox Demonstration: Bay Area Rapid Transit Integrated Carpool to Transit Access Program Evaluation Report

Martin, Elliot W.; Cohen, Adam P.; Yassine, Ziad; Brown, Les; Shaheen, Susan A. · 2020 · ROSA P / United States. Federal Transit Administration. Office of Research, Demonstration, and Innovation

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Summary

This report evaluates the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Integrated Carpool to Transit Access Program, a Mobility on Demand (MOD) Sandbox Demonstration funded by the Federal Transit Administration. The project addressed the challenge of high parking demand at BART stations and the difficulty of enforcing legacy carpool permits, which often suffered from fraudulent use by single-occupancy vehicles. To mitigate these issues, BART partnered with Scoop Technologies to deploy a digital matching platform that connected drivers and passengers traveling to BART stations. Drivers who carpooled via Scoop received guaranteed parking spaces until 10:00 AM. The pilot launched in January 2017 at the Dublin/Pleasanton station and expanded to 17 stations, with the evaluation concluding in April 2019. The evaluation, conducted by ICF and the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley, tested 13 hypotheses using Scoop activity data, user surveys, citation records, ridership statistics, and expert interviews. The study aimed to determine the program’s impact on carpooling rates, parking utilization, enforcement costs, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and transit ridership. The findings indicated that the program successfully increased overall carpooling to BART, with Dublin/Pleasanton accounting for 70% of the 115,806 evaluated carpool person-trips. Scoop vehicles increased parking utilization by carpooling vehicles, raising the estimated persons-per-parked-vehicle by up to 5% at Dublin/Pleasanton and approximately 1% at other active stations. Enforcement costs per carpool space declined because the program increased carpool usage without significantly increasing enforcement labor; staff also reported a qualitative drop in fraudulent permit use. The program achieved its goal of spreading arrival times more evenly between 6:00 AM and 10:00 AM. Survey data revealed that 41% of users would have driven alone without Scoop, leading to a likely net reduction in VMT. While ridership data could not statistically isolate Scoop’s impact due to normal fluctuations, users reported increased BART usage and reduced personal transportation costs. However, the evaluation could not conclusively determine if the revenue from increased ridership exceeded the program’s marginal costs. The study concludes that technology-enabled carpooling can effectively improve transit access, reduce single-occupancy vehicle trips, and optimize parking utilization. The project provided valuable lessons on implementation, contractual negotiations, and accessibility challenges. These findings suggest that similar integrated carpool-to-transit models can support multimodal transportation goals by lowering VMT and enhancing the efficiency of transit-oriented parking infrastructure.

Key finding

The program increased carpooling to BART stations, reduced enforcement costs per carpool space, and likely decreased vehicle miles traveled by shifting single-occupancy drivers to carpools.

Methodology

mixed_methods

Provenance

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