Using Technology to Cut Commuting Congestion

How do you get from Point A to Point B? The challenge once was just moving in the fastest, cheapest, safest way possible. Now it’s also about reducing carbon emissions and accommodating electric vehicles. Jinhua Zhao believes, with technology, there’s untapped potential to create more efficient and equitable systems. Learn more  .

Transcript

00:00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING] JINHUA ZHAO: I'm Jinhua Zhao, associate professor of City and Transportation planning at MIT. I study behavior science and transportation technology, trying to bring the two together in order shape travel behavior and design interesting transportation systems. So I study how people move and why people move-- particularly look at the emotional and social aspect of people's motivation. People move because they want to reduce the travel time

00:00:28 or lower the travel costs, but also they may often use transportation as a way to express themselves, to demonstrate their social status. Some people were concerned about the environment and, therefore, try to find a lot more sustainable way to travel. A moment ago you mentioned Jason Jay who runs the sustainability initiative.

00:00:51 I run the mobility Initiative, and we two actually try to collaborate in order to decarbonize the urban mobility system. You start with the first one on what I call the multimodal mobility system design. Each of us have a very different expectation with travel, right? We will have different needs, the distance, the capacity, the directness, the convenience. But no single transportation mode

00:01:16 can satisfy all these desires by itself. For example, public transit is a very good to provide high throughput, therefore reduce congestion, reduce CO2 emission, but it does not respond to individual preferences. And it cannot move around more responsively. While the individual mode, like for example car or autonomous vehicle, they can be very responsive, can deal with this scattered demand, but they typically cannot provide a high capacity.

00:01:47 So my research is try to bring these new mobility technologies, like autonomous vehicles, shared vehicles, these micromobility like scooters, e-bikes, but integrate them together with the public transportation system, so we have a multimodal mobility system that brings people the best service. For example we've been doing this in Singapore and then there are the two cases. The one case in Singapore is to say--

00:02:16 if you look at the-- Singapore has a very good subway system there, right? And in one of the subway stations station called [INAUDIBLE],, and it serves a large kind of neighborhood there. Many people either walk to the station or take the bus to the station. But we design a system so that we can have certain buses-- let me back up a little bit. There's actually 15 bus routes serving that train station,

00:02:45 right. And we designed a system that we maintained half of the bus routes with high capacity that still provide the dirct service, but the second half would serve very low amount of demand. So we repurposed those bus route so that they can have a direct service to the station, while using the autonomous vehicle on demand to serve the scattered demand, right? So that's one example how to blend

00:03:12 the high-capacity public transit and the more responsive low-capacity autonomous vehicle together to serve the local [INAUDIBLE]. [MUSIC PLAYING]