The AARP Grant would focus on increasing safety, accessibility and comfort at our mobility hubs and hire community ambassadors to help users interact with and learn about Mobility Hubs and provide vital feedback. The grant will cover the cost of installing new seating, lighting, and signage to make our Mobility Hubs more welcoming, safer, and easier to navigate. The funds would also cover hiring local ambassadors to help educate older residents on how to use the hubs as well as shared bikes, scooters and EV car share. And, ambassadors will be deployed to help educate all riders on proper riding and parking behaviors in an effort to surface the impact that sidewalk riding and misparked shared bikes and scooters have.

The grant will focus on adding amenities to 2 of our mobility hub locations, one in North Minneapolis at North Market and one in South Minneapolis at Lake and Chicago. These are the mobility hub locations that have the highest percentage of older adults nearby.

The grant will also provide funding for ambassadors that will focus on those areas as well as additional areas that have both high bike and scooter ridership as well as older adults such as the Stone Arch Bridge area.

Current data shows that the areas around these mobility hubs have higher than average levels of older adults as well as being predominantly BIPOC communities. These areas are also less car dependent than other areas of the city, so have a higher potential to benefit from these services.

We're missing data that helps us to better understand why older, less car dependent adults aren’t taking advantage of shared mobility services more when we know they need more transportation options. We also want to learn the reasons why users ride on the sidewalks and park vehicles in ways that impact other people so we can tailor our educate and engagement efforts to better address these issues. We will seek to get this data by developing intercept surveys and employing ambassadors as part of this program.

This program will help advance equity by making shared mobility more accessible to a large group of residents opening up new opportunities for employment, social services, health care, cultural opportunities and more. Additionally, we aim to create more welcoming and safe public spaces that people feel comfortable in and that begin to become central community centers. The program will also help educate users on proper riding and parking behaviors hopefully leading to lower complaints and incident rates allowing people to move more freely in their neighborhoods and not be burdened or obstructed by shared mobility services.

The impacts of this project will be measured in multiple ways. Quantitatively, we can track the overall number of people who are using the mobility hubs as well as anecdotally how long they stay on average. We will also track the number of shared mobility trips starting and ending at mobility hubs as well as the proportion of users at the start and end of the season who are older adults to see the impact our ambassadors are having on increasing ridership. Qualitatively, our ambassadors will be engaging with local residents and mobility hub visitors to gather feedback and conduct surveys. Lastly, we’ll track the number of complaints related to shared mobility in the areas we target for the ambassador program before and after their engagement to get a sense on how well people’s understanding of parking and riding rules increases.

Since this is a program primarily centered around our mobility hubs and ambassadors, we will be constantly engaging with the community members who will be most impacted. Our ambassadors will be at these locations every weekend throughout the season. We’ll also be working with community organizations and neighborhood associations where our mobility hubs are located. At the end of the season, we will create a public report on the Mobility Hub pilot and include a section addressing these outcomes specifically.