Advances in transportation systems, fueled by on-demand mobility-platforms, crowd-sourcing, ride-hailing and increasing automation, promise to enhance the livability and competitiveness of cities and rural areas globally. A fundamental question is whether these innovations will contribute to solving, or inadvertently exacerbate, critical challenges such as congestion, emissions and inequitable access to mobility. This Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) research addresses a gap in current approaches by integrating quantitative and qualitative multi-disciplinary insights and developing methods to study how society adapts to evolving mobility technologies. Integrating insights from the social sciences in existing passenger and logistics system models will help understand how adoption behaviors are affected by diverse community beliefs and culture in rapidly changing mobility contexts. This research will have far-reaching effects, delivering new tools to tailor transformative mobility solutions to citizens' needs, decongest urban networks and expand mobility to underserved communities. The project includes educational efforts where students evaluate engineering solutions that align with human behavior and livability goals. The project will also develop online educational material and training tools for Chicago high school teachers, to promote careers in engineering in diverse communities.
The goal of this project is to establish a new foundation and develop methods to better understand and predict impacts of emerging freight and passenger mobility adoption. Specifically, this research establishes an analytical community mobility adoption framework that integrates current quantitative theory, data and methods (i.e. formal surveys, discrete choice analysis and supervised learning) with qualitative social science perspectives (theory of social thresholds, ethnographic data on neighborhood-scale mobility behavior). Robust policy guidance tools derived through combining qualitative, participatory, multi-stakeholder research methods and formal policy scenario simulation are expected to inform communities' transition resulting from the potentially disruptive socio-technical changes in transportation mobility choices. The impact will be strengthened by integration with education and outreach approaches that inspire, challenge and educate future civil engineers to address mobility challenges with technically informed and culturally sensitive designs.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
