Description
Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is an indicator of vehicular emissions, which impacts climate change. Various stakeholders aim at reducing VMT to cause reductions in emissions. This research explores the use of crowdsourcing in supporting the efforts of the stakeholders in reducing VMT among college students at California State University Long Beach. Crowdsourcing is emerging as a very promising tool in finding solutions to problems otherwise impossible to solve without a collective human intelligence. A smartphone application is developed to collect travel data and behavior of 55 college students as participants. The behavior is tracked after providing advance information on parking availability on the university campus. It is observed that VMT reductions occur from Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday with car users and Monday through Thursday with transit bus users. The largest reduction of 4% occurs with car usage on Thursday. On the same day, the highest reduction in VMT of 5% occurs with bus usage. Thus, crowdsourcing information on campus parking showed that VMT reduction is effective with the small number of participants involved in this pilot study.
Publication Date
4-2020
Publication Type
Report
Topic
Sustainable Transportation and Land Use, Transportation Technology
Digital Object Identifier
10.31979/mti.2020.1930
MTI Project
1930
Mineta Transportation Institute URL
https://transweb.sjsu.edu/research/1930-Crowdsourcing-VMT-Reduction-Strategy
Keywords
Vehicle miles traveled, Crowdsourcing, Smartphone, Driving, Ridership
Disciplines
Transportation Engineering
Recommended Citation
Shailesh Chandra, Rutviz Vyas, and Ravi Mazin. "Evaluating Crowdsourcing as a VMT Reduction Tool to Support Smart Cities Initiatives" Mineta Transportation Institute (2020). https://doi.org/10.31979/mti.2020.1930
Research Brief
