Currently, affordable housing units have become an important part of urban housing planning, and both Federal and local governments seek to provide more affordable housing for low-income populations. Additionally, transit-oriented development (TOD) has attracted increased interest from local transit agencies. Overall, these two developments have been addressed separately resulting in a spatial gap between affordable housing units and transit services including fixed-route bus/rail and paratransit bus. Much of the research related to affordable housing and transit service has recently focused on combining these two processes; however, this is a complex effort, which may not show short-term results. Bikeshare, as an emerging micro-mobility service, shows a great potential to increase accessibility, especially for disadvantaged populations. Moreover, researchers have not thoroughly examined the potential of bikeshare to solve the aforementioned accessibility gap between affordable housing and transit. Thus, this project will develop a framework to optimize the location of bikeshare stations to mitigate the barriers between affordable housing and transit services. This multi-objective optimization process will consider both bikeshare trip demand, transit service schedule, available affordable housing units, and other geographic information. In the end, the optimization results will provide bikeshare planning suggestions to connect affordable housing units and transit services.
