Abstract:
In most countries, the population is ageing, and population ageing is particularly strong in North America. By 2030, 22,8% of residents will be aged 65 or over in Canada. These demographic trends pose challenges to existing mobility infrastructure and services, which play a crucial role in enabling older residents to maintain a high level of independence and well-being.
The RAIM (Responsible Automation for Inclusive Mobility) project is a British-Canadian collaboration to address how an on-demand autonomous vehicle system can meet the diverse needs of older populations and improve the lives of older travellers.
Estimation of older adult mobility needs, and how they vary over space and time, is crucial for effective planning and implementation of such service, and conventional four-step approaches lack the granularity to fully account for these needs. To address this challenge, we proposed an agent-based model of older adults mobility demand in Winnipeg, Canada. The model is built for 2022 using primarily open data, and is implemented in the Multi-Agent Transport Simulation (MATSim) toolkit. After calibration to accurately reproduce observed travel behaviors, a new AMoD service is tested in simulation and its potential adoption among Winnipeg older adults is explored. The model can help policy makers to estimate the needs of the elderly populations for door-to-door transportation and can guide the design of AmoD transport systems.