Over 25,000 households in Memphis do not have access to a vehicle. In many of the city’s lowest-income census tracts, between 30-45% of households do not have access to a vehicle, creating barriers to accessing jobs, education, and other resources that improve upward mobility and wellbeing. The average cost of car ownership for a household in Memphis is now over $13,000 annually and rising each year. This means that many Memphians are spending just as much or more on transportation as they are on housing and must make tough tradeoffs on how to spend limited income. This challenge can be particularly daunting for residents trying to achieve upward mobility by participating in workforce development, skills training and job placement opportunities because they need reliable transportation to complete program requirements and get to work on time.

In preparation for this Hackathon, Innovate Memphis spoke with several workforce development leaders about the challenges and root causes their clients face most often. Some participants don’t have a driver’s license, share a car with others in their household, or have an aging vehicle that doesn’t always work. Some participants use public transit (MATA buses) but experience issues like 1) long commute times with many bus transfers; 2) limited routes that go to key job sites like logistics centers in the southeast part of the city; and 3) no transit service during overnight shifts. Others use private rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft, but drivers aren’t always available in every neighborhood or time of day, and the cost per ride can be far more expensive than public transit depending on the time and route. Start Co’s recent Urbanite Mobility Challenge report also describes important barriers and opportunities related to local transportation access related to safety, reliability, and trust between service providers and riders.

Although some workforce development programs offer supports like rideshare vouchers or pickup service, they usually have limited budget and timeframes for offering this support to each individual participant. Moreover, many programs have a small number of participants at a given time who need to get to job sites across Memphis and Shelby County, making it hard to pool rides within just one program.

Call to Action:
With a large geographic service area and finite resources, the City of Memphis is seeking new ideas on how to expand transportation options and improve frequency/reliability of service with job and workforce development programs in mind. The goal is to complement existing services that MATA and other transportation providers offer either through 1) solutions that make it easier for workforce program leaders and participants to navigate or use existing services; or 2) solutions that could help work force programs and/or individual participants pool resources and coordinate rides.

Potential Hackathon Topics
Potential Hackathon subtopics to pursue include (but aren’t limited to) the following:
*Identifying geographic areas that would benefit from more frequent transportation service based on data and mapping
*Making recommendations on how and where to deploy different transportation modes (ex: bus transit, microtransit, rideshare, carpooling) based on data and mapping
*Identifying potential technology and process solutions that would help different job placement and workforce development service providers coordinate transportation services for clients
*Identifying potential technology and process solutions that would help clients directly schedule and coordinate ridesharing

Hacker Skill Sets Needed
*Data analysis/data science
*GIS and mapping
*User experience (UX) and user-centered design
*App and web tool development
*Project management
*Communications, marketing and design