PROJECT TITLE :

Personalized Public Transportation: A Mobility Model and its Application to Melbourne

ABSTRACT:

This paper explores a vision for urban and suburban transportation for cities like Melbourne, Australia. Termed Personalised Public Transportation, it builds upon recent trends in vehicle sharing, electric vehicles, mobile payments and cloud computing. The goal is to create on the best of the worlds of personal and public transportation. Personal transportation offers ownership, comfort and convenience, but is higher value, and subject to externalities (traffic jams, pollution, etc.). Public transportation is economical, cheaper and has lower energy/carbon footprint, however usually includes a last-mile drawback (access) and low spatio-temporal coverage in suburbia. We tend to envisage a future model of leasing public transportation via a service similar to cellphone services, where the user pays for convenience and sharing of a network. We describe the key style options inherent to this mobility model. The vehicular platform permits the entire fleet to be operated and managed via a cloud computing service in order to maximise convenience and minimise price. A mathematical formulation to urge a initial order approximation of the advantages of Personalised Public Transportation shows that it is a promising approach for Melbourne, Australia - a 5percent adoption can result in a discount in the price of travel (relative to operating a private automobile) by over four%, energy footprint by over 3p.c, and Carbon footprint by nearly 9%.