Equity Promotion in Public Transportation

There are many news articles reporting the obstacles confronting poverty-stricken households in access to public transits. These barriers create a great deal of inconveniences for these impoverished families and more importantly, they contribute lot social inequalities. A typical approach addressing issue is build transport infrastructure offer opportunities transits especially those deprived communities. Examples include adding bus lines connecting needy residents railways systems extending existing areas with low socioeconomic status. Recently, new strategy proposed, which harness ubiquitous ride-hailing services connect disadvantaged nearest transportations. Compared former infrastructure-based solution, ride-hailing-based enjoys few exclusive benefits such as higher effectiveness flexibility. In this paper, we propose an optimization model study how integrate two approaches together equity-promotion purposes. Specifically, aim design allocating given limited budget different candidate programs that overall equity maximized, defined minimum covering ratio among all pre-specified protected groups (based on race, income, etc.). We have designed linear-programming (LP) based rounding algorithm, proves achieve optimal approximation 1-1/e. Additionally, test our algorithm against baselines real data assembled by outsourcing multiple datasets collected city Chicago. Experimental results confirm theoretical predictions demonstrate LP-based promoting equity, when insufficient.