Vehicle Design Strategies to Reduce COVID-19 Transmission in Shared and Pooled Vehicles 

Abstract
Shared and pooled travel modes are less energy- and emissions-intensive alternatives to the more dominant mode of single-occupancy vehicles. Both old and new shared and pooled modes, including public transportation, ride-hailing, and shared micromobility, are critical components to a more sustainable mobility future. Many factors inhibit people’s willingness to use shared and pooled modes, such as sacrifices in comfort and privacy.

The COVID-19 pandemic introduces a new and serious concern of virus transmission among users of shared and pooled travel modes. With physical distancing advisories and shelter-in-place mandates, public transportation use is down 65% since the beginning of the pandemic in the United States (1). Ride-hailing has also been affected, with transportation network companies shutting down their ride-pooling options.

Innovative vehicle design strategies are crucial to facilitating a safe return to pre-pandemic levels of shared and pooled travel, and ultimately to achieve even higher levels of sharing and pooling required to sufficiently reduce climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions associated with the transportation sector. This research aimed to articulate and analyze the range of available design features that can be implemented in shared and pooled vehicles to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission. The study consists of three data collection efforts: review of vehicle design strategies, consumer interviews, and expert interviews.

Our systematic review of vehicle design strategies assessed design features for shared micromobility, taxis, ride-hailing, car-sharing, car-pooling, shuttles, buses, trains, and airplanes, as well as their associated stations and apps. Data were gathered predominately from recent popular media regarding vehicle design innovations and modifications in response to the pandemic, and limited scholarly research on the topic. Features were coded and categorized, e.g., in terms of which vehicle types they are applicable to, as well as the mechanism by which they reduce risk of transmission - through creating more physical distance between passengers, separating passengers through barriers, improving or protecting hygiene, or reducing and/or treating shared air.

Innovative vehicle design feature categories included reimagined seating reconfigurations to spread passengers out and barriers to separate them from each other (2,3,4), as well as air circulation, ventilation, and air filtration (2,5,6,7), and best practices and technologies for surface sanitization processes, including UV light (3,6). Additionally, vehicle interior materials are targeted as opportunities for improvement, such as replacing stainless steel with copper, which has antimicrobial properties (3). Increasing the amount of touchless technologies is also a prominent recommendation (2,3,4,6,7).

Interviews with university students and staff provide a user perspective regarding the value of identified vehicle design features in addressing concerns about shared and pooled modes. Interviews with experts on infectious disease provide a sense of the relative effectiveness of the features—within and across categories (e.g., seating; barriers; air filtration, circulation, and ventilation; materials and touchless technologies; and sanitization processes). By triangulating insights from these multiple-stakeholder interviews, we identify high-leverage design solutions that objectively mitigate the risk of COVID-19 transmission and are acceptable and perceived as valuable to consumers of shared and pooled transportation.