In partnership with
RI-Der
Incentivizing Micromobility in Rhode Island
RI-Der is a systems model to solve last-mile mobility issues by creating a incentivizing environment for local businesses and community to support Bike ridership in the city of Providence
Team:
Primary Role:
Project type:
Asad Khan, Jiawei Lu
User Research, User Interview, UI Design, User Testing
Systems Design
Nov 2022
Intro
App interface in action
Designed on Figma, the interaction shows how you can find places around you where you can park and find rides easily.
Preliminary Research
Our prompt was to solve the mobility issue in the sate of Rhode Island and design better / efficient systems .
Though our idea was to plan for something implementable in the short term, we also researched about future mobility arenas that were being developed and adopted around the world
We started by studying RIDOT`s future mobility plan - - TRANSIT FORWARD RI 2040 and talking to our stakeholder to get a more in-depth understanding of their system. After multiple rounds of system mapping and user interviews, we framed the problem of solving the last-mile mobility problem in Providence.
User Research
We conducted a session to map the system diagram for the public transportation system in Providence to find the design space.
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
MD
Faye
Martin
Cole
Andy
Jonathan
We analyzed the qualitative data from user interviews and got some valuable insights including-
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Providence is walkable most of the time.
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The public transpotation system is rarely on time.
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Most people like escooters and ebikes.
Survery Insights
1st Iteration
Park & Pedal Model
User journey analysis
It is a network of parking stations conveniently located cycling distance from the city’s employment centers, allowing people to park their cars in a designated spot, and pedal a bike to work, avoiding “last-mile” congestion and parking in the city.
— Eric Weiss
Assistant Chief of Planning and the Bicycle & Pedestrian Coordinator at RIDOT
We conducted a survey to ask people `s opinions about this idea, some of the key feedbacks we got from our survey include:
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It`s a great recreation event for cycling enthusiasts
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It`s a great weekend activity
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It could solve the parking problems in big cities but Providence doesn`t have this issue
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A mental burden to make the transition after work/school
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Time-consuming & weather condition limiting
We then created a second journey map “To Be Story” to help us discuss the pros and cons of this model and discovered that it won`t help us to solve the last-mile connectivity problem for us in various conditions.
We abandoned this idea based on our research result.
Pivoting
Research and Ideation Again
We conducted another round of preliminary research and talked to people working in the industry to get valuable insights.
Yuxin Horatio
BoungJin Ko
Jake Moritz
Former MID student;
Worked in Escooter industry for 6+ years
RISD ID student, car nerd; Worked on multiple public transportation projects;
Interned in Hyundai
Former MID student;
Worked on project to legalizing Ebikes in NYC
Insights:
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E-bikes and escooters are great tool to solve last-mibility issue in Providence.
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People are worried about bike safety issue and it won`t be solved by any kind of lock.
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Micromobility could raise the land price of the area it`s installed.
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The city wants to regulate micromobility.
2nd Round of Brainstorming Session
We came up with more than 15 ideas and talked through all of them. We also used the Prioritization Grid to categorize all the ideas and picked two we want to go.
#1 Bike Insurance
A subscription-based insurance model for private bikes. People can park their bike in designated parking space monitored by a smart camera system and get reimbursed when it gets stolen.
#2 Ebike Incentivization
An incentization model that encourages people to go to local businesses on micromobility and lowers down the price of it.
We brought our idea back to the people we talked to and got the insights and feedbacks including:
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The bike security problem could be solved by a shared mobility service
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People already have different solutions to this problem, including bringing bikes indoors
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The current micro mobility solutions are still too expensive
System Mapping
Video demonstration of our idea
MVP Testing
We came up with a minimal viable product- to give people cookies in the RISD cafe for those who showed up on their bikes or e-bikes. This would mean that people are willing to change their behavior if they were getting incentivized for it.
We conducted the test for two days during the weekends and all the cookies were gone when I went back to the cafe on Monday. We also got a lot of people filling up the survey.
Back To Stakeholder
Final Argument
We then brought our idea back to our stakeholder and received the following feedback from him
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“Lowered-priced shared Ebikes/Escooters are great solutions for Providence”
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“Undocked systems could be a problem for the city”
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“Docks could increase the land value and provide incentization for the system”
Final project overview presentation
Acknowledgement
This project was finished by the assistance of many people and I’d like to thank my mentor Andy Law from RISD and Halley Wultz from IBM who helped me learn a lot about Teaming up and successfully bringing this project to a completion. I`d also like to thank my teammate Jiawei without whom it wouldn't have been completed. Along with that, I want to thank everyone involved in this initiative, including:
Andrew Koziol Assistant Chief of Planning at Rhode Island Department of Transportation
Eric Weis RIDOT Bicycle & Pedestrian Coordinator
Alex (Krogh-Grabble) Ellis Principal Planner at City of Providence
Liza Farr Curbside Administrator for the city of Providence and Mobility planner
Yuxin Horatio Han Senior Industrial Designer at Superpedestrian
Jake Moritz Ebike specialist
BoungJin Ko Senior student at RISD specialized in future mobility
Alex (Krogh-Grabble) Ellis
Principal Planner at City of Providence
Liza Farr
Curbside Administrator and Mobility planner for the city of Providence