Solving the first and last mile problem with connected and autonomous vehicles

The first and last mile problem describes the difficulty of starting and completing a journey when using public transport, where there are limited options once away from centralised transport infrastructure such as train stations. It is particularly an issue for commuter journeys where time lost on regular repeated trips becomes a barrier to the use of public transport so that commuters use their own cars, which consequently contributes towards increasing pollution. With the potential advent of connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) on our roads in future, it may be possible to reduce the travel time of commuters between the train station and their home or place of work and therefore potentially reduce the number of car trips that are made. In this paper, we model commuters using CAVs, and for the first time optimise the locations where CAV hubs should be placed to increase the number of commuters opting to travel by trains using an evolutionary optimiser. In a real world case study between Exmouth and Digby & Sowton stations in UK, we demonstrate that with only 11 hubs shared between the origin and the destination stations, we may halve the number of car trips.