Students Develop New Solutions to Increase Public Transit Usage

New mobility modes, increasing urban congestion, an influx of data, and needs for expanded mobility services and access are forcing cities to reevaluate the way they design and manage the public way. Students at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Innovation Center explored how technology can address these and other mobility challenges rising in cities across the world through the two-semester IXD class from Fall 2019 to Spring 2020. IXD, short for Interdisciplinary (Product/Service/Experience) Development, brings together undergraduate and occasional graduate students from the Design, Engineering, and Marketing disciplines work together to solve real-world problems with our partners.

This year, we partnered with City Tech Collaborative for the first time, in conjunction with Bosch , HERE Technologies , and Microsoft , to improve the public transit experience for Chicagoans. Over the course of the year we saw students learn what mobility means, progress to interview dozens of stakeholders from Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) employees to everyday riders, hear from mobility experts from our sponsors, and finally, develop novel transportation solutions for the next generation of mobility.

The goal of the IXD class is to get students to think differently about how to solve complex problems. Innovation is not simply waiting for inspiration to strike – it requires completely understanding challenges and identifying opportunities to create a solution. We, along with our partners at City Tech, believe that collaboration across sectors is critical to developing effective, sustainable, and scalable solutions. Design, engineering, and marketing students practice interdisciplinary collaboration within the IXD class by working in groups. Each background brings a unique perspective on how to understand and solve a problem, and this exchange of ideas leads to innovative discoveries.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic decreasing ridership on public transit, buses and trains will continue to be essential to our urban mobility systems. As urban populations grow, public transit can move people in a way that is cost-effective, good for the environment, and serves everyone. With these needs in mind, it is critical we make public transit accessible, appealing, and effective.

Using Chicago as a testbed, students focused their work on how to increase public transit access so that residents utilize public transit for at least one leg of their journey. Forty students dedicated 32 weeks to exploring solutions to address the following problem statements:

1. How might we increase adoption of CTA modes of transport by improving awareness?
2. How might we reduce the friction of transferring from other modes of transportation to CTA modes?
3. How might we improve the experience of riders on CTA busses?
4. How might we improve the experience of riders on CTA trains?
5. How might we imagine a next level transportation system for Chicago in five years?

The student team looking at ways to increase adoption of CTA modes of transportation refocused their research on improving access. They created EyeTravel, an app that helps both fully and partially visually impaired users navigate seamlessly throughout the city of Chicago as well as into the CTA stations via audio input that takes the user on a step-by-step journey from point A to B.

The team looking at reducing friction of transferring modes created ChicaGO! , a trip planning mobile application that encourages multimodal transportation and rewards riders. This app would provide routes that effectively prioritizes the travel factors that matter most to each user (preferred modes of transit, travel time, and desirable destinations) and redirects congestion during peak travel hours, benefitting both individual riders and the CTA ridership as a whole.

The bus experience team created EZGo, a novel, contactless fare payment and boarding system utilizing a mobile app and a Bluetooth-enabled receiver to maximize efficiency in the onboarding process. As passengers board the bus, either from the front or back doors, the fare is automatically charged to their payment account and a light flashes either green or red for each rider, indicating payment or nonpayment.

The train experience team developed the GoFAR a mobile app to bridge the gap between language barriers and navigation in Chicago. GoFAR is used for language-assistance that provides real-time Augmented Reality (AR) digital visual directions, signage translation, and audio translations to guide users in navigating from point A to B, and specifically while navigating the CTA. This application will allow users to navigate confidently through the city using only one app specifically focused on Chicago tourists and the underserved Limited English Proficiency (LEP) individuals & non-native English speakers.

The next generation transportation team created Launch by CTA , an on-demand shuttle service that picks up passengers checked in at designated Launch Padspots found outside partnered businesses. Passengers will be driven to the nearest train or bus stop, providing an affordable, multimodal option, making transportation to the final destination that much easier.

Taken together, these solutions act at an ecosystem level. Instead of focusing on the design of a single product, they involve a service idea based on a combination of hardware (i.e., beacons to be installed in stations, wearables to identify riders, etc.) and software (i.e., AI algorithms to optimize multimodal mobility, or automatic translation systems, etc.). They build a future vision of Mobility as a Service (MAAS) where cloud-based technologies enable increased efficiency, ‘one-click’ ease-of-use, personalization, and on-demand services. This vision focuses on providing a better transportation experience, bridging the physical in-person experience (supporting a ‘frictionless’ trip) with the digital experience (planning a trip, managing payments, and building a personal profile).

While they are based on innovative technologies, all these solutions are applied with a user-first, human-centered design approach that prioritizes specific social policies of the City of Chicago and its metro area: public transportation priorities such as design-for-all, reduction of congestion, elimination of transit deserts, and economic/environmental sustainability.

The user-centered IXD process focused initially on understanding the “pains” and “gains” of riding the CTA. Through their primary and secondary research in these areas, our students discovered opportunities for innovation in existing inequities for various demographics and marginalized customer segments. For example, some teams targeted regularly overlooked groups such as the visually impaired, Limited English Proficiency (LEP) riders and consumers living in transit deserts. Each of the proposed solutions provide a clear value proposition that enhance the overall rider experience across multiple transportation touchpoints.

Student teams also sought to make public transportation more accessible through technological advancements and proposed new and exciting lifestyle sub-brands for the CTA. For example, one of the groups sought to gamify the rider experience by adding a rewards program while another group leveraged a new AR mobile platform. In this process, all students took advantage of the potential to leverage existing City Tech partnerships and cutting-edge technologies from Bosch, HERE Technologies, and Microsoft.

By including design, electrical engineering, and marketing students, all teams were able to simultaneously understand user needs, emerging technology, and the business landscape. Weaving these perspectives brought about unique solutions that no single discipline could have created on its own.

Over the course of the IXD class this past year, we believe that all of us involved benefited in different ways. Our students got experience doing hands-on, real-world projects comparable to developing research and innovation in a cutting-edge tech company. Our technology partners, Bosch, HERE Technologies, and Microsoft, gained insights into the next generation of Chicagoans’ attitudes and beliefs are toward transportation with a user-first, design thinking innovation methods. In addition, the learnings will be taken into consideration for City Tech’s Advanced Mobility Initiative.

One student said of their experience, “I really enjoyed this class and had a great experience overall. I loved the concept of this course where we got the opportunity to work with students from different majors because it provided useful experience in collaboration across multiple functions. Our team was very passionate about our project because City Tech presented us with a business problem that we were very interested in providing a solution for. Overall, this was one of my favorite classes I took at UIC. The IXD course added a lot of value to my degree by offering the chance to work with a real client and having companies such as Microsoft, Bosch, and HERE as wonderful resources. I learned so much from this class and I got to walk away with great friends that I met along the way!"

This collaboration would not have been possible without all partners’ commitment of time and resources. To create true innovations that serve users across many traditional dividing lines, it takes a collection of varied perspectives that all have an equal voice. We would like to thank City Tech, Bosch, HERE, Microsoft, and our amazing undergraduate students at UIC for providing those voices.

About the Authors: Lo’Ay Abu Salah (Electrical Engineering), Kim Moon (Marketing), and Marco Susani (Design) are professors at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

About City Tech Collaborative (City Tech): City Tech is an urban solutions accelerator that tackles problems too big for any single sector or organization to solve alone. City Tech’s work uses IoT sensing networks, advanced analytics, and urban design to create scalable, market ready solutions. Current initiatives address advanced mobility, healthy cities, connected construction, and emerging growth opportunities. City Tech was born and raised in Chicago, and every city is a potential partner. Visit www.CityTech.org and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.