Ridehailing and the “First/Last Mile” Challenge in Public Transit: Experimental Evidence from a Ride-2-Connect Program

Cities have begun experimenting with bundling ride-hailing with mass transit services to increase access and address the ‘first mile/last mile’ problem, which is widely considered a grand challenge for the transportation sector. We study the effects of randomly assigned subsidies for ride-hail-to-transit (R2T) services in a large sample of riders in the Chicago Metropolitan Region, San Francisco Bay Area and Washington D.C measuring impacts on travel behavior using trip-level data extracted from participant mobile phones. We examine direct impacts on substitution away from private vehicles and increases in public transit utilization for transit-stranded subpopulations and build a structural model to simulate the potential effects of a citywide program on congestion/emissions externalities.