Fundamental
Principles for Sustainable Metropolitan Mobility Systems
(and Some Examples of MIT’s contributions)
Notes prepared for visit of U.S. Secretary of
Transportation, Ray LaHood
By Chris
Zegras, Assistant Professor of Transportation and
Urban Planning
MIT, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning/Engineering Systems
(comments
welcome)
3 May 2010
It’s
an honor to have you visit us today, Mr. Secretary, and I’m grateful for the
opportunity to offer a few thoughts on metropolitan mobility. I’ll do so by introducing five basic
principles that I view as key to sustainable metropolitan mobility in the 21st
Century:
I. The Three
I’s (Information, Intelligence, Integration)
II.
Sustainability
III.
Multi-Scale (from local to global)
IV.
Practical Innovation
V. Education
I
will discuss these principles in light of some of the ongoing and new relevant
research and educational activities that I am involved in here at MIT,
including via:
·
The MIT Portugal Program, a
multi-year, multi-university research and education program in engineering
systems, funded by the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher
Education;
·
The Singapore MIT
Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Future
Urban Mobility Inter-disciplinary Research Group, funded by the Singapore
National Research Foundation;
·
The recently
awarded Centre of Excellence for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT-Across
Latitudes and Cultures), a multi-university collaborative research center
funded by the Volvo Research and Education Foundation.
Integration represents a fundamental necessity for metropolitan
mobility today. We need integration:
• of modes, requiring multi-modal
planning and operation of the mobility system, including human-powered mobility (i.e., biking and walking…);
• of purposes, or end uses, treating the
passenger and freight systems in a coherent fashion;
• of hardwares and softwares,
capitalizing on innovative network computing and control technologies to
communicate between systems and users;
• of disciplines, including civil
engineering, computer science, operations research, planning, economics, and
environmental sciences;
• of analytic approaches, models and so
forth; and,
• of institutions and sectors, bringing
together land use, transportation, environment, information and communication,
and other relevant actors.
Clearly
the Obama Administration has shown active interest in advancing some of the
integration agenda at the metropolitan level, through, for example, the DOT-HUD-EPA
Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the TIGER grant
funds, and your own calls for integrating the needs of human-powered mobility into our system.
In
terms of Information, the
networked society of advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs)
has particular relevance for our metropolitan mobility systems, because the
ICTs, as we now know well, have now gone fully mobile – our metropolitan areas
and their transportation systems have evolved into broad sensor and control
networks.
The
main challenge now is getting the right information into the right hands at the right time for the right
purposes:
• User decisions (before they travel)
• Provider decisions (deployment; when travel is taking
place; accurate pricing of the assets)
• Planning decisions (what to provide, when, and where).
In
other words, how can we effectively deploy these data sources for improved
tactical, operational, and strategic purposes?
The
information glut these systems threaten to overwhelm us with also raises
important concerns regarding privacy, data ownership (and thus permitted use)
and transparency (including for accountability).
Overall,
of course, this falls into the broad area of ITS,
which the Federal Government has long be a strong and important champion of,
including via recent initiatives such as IntelliDrive. The Administration’s Open Government Directive is another good example of
important movement in the right direction here.
Finally,
Intelligence refers the
proper use of this new information via: data-collection deployment (e.g., smart
phones, and the like, for improved travel and activity surveys), data mining to
extract higher level knowledge, and using advance ICTs and resulting computing
powers to improve our abilities for short-, medium-, and long-term predictions
about system performance – that is, knowing what the system will do and how we
can make it do it better.
As
examples of our work in the “Three I’s”, I’ll briefly highlight two projects
from MIT Portugal Program Transportation Systems Research, undertaking in
collaboration with partners from Univ. Porto,
IST, and Univ. Coimbra:
1.
Strategic Options to Integrate Transportation and Urban
Revitalization
• integrating academics with stakeholders
• integrating advanced microsimulation
models of land use and transportation with strategic scenario planning
techniques.
o
The latter is
particularly important as we have embraced scenario
planning in its “true spirit” – to identify important uncertainties about
the future, to enable the design of innovative and robust portfolios of
strategic options.
o
This also poses
non-trivial computing challenges (for forecasts); however, it also allows for
new data-mining techniques for scenario development and robustness
testing. We are piloting such techniques
in this project.
2.
CityMotion
• showing the potential uses of information from the increasingly “sensed” city, especially by
“fusing” data for new uses;
• successfully convening a large number of information (data) providers from public
and private sectors, including a major cel phone
service provider, freight fleet operator, taxi operator, toll road company, and
several public transportation companies and municipalities.
o
Resulting in a
large source of heterogenous data, currently being
compiled and “fused” by a university consortium to demonstrate the power of the fusion.
o
Enabling
development of applications such as a short-term traffic prediction tool being
developed using software (DynaMIT) developed by MIT’s ITS Lab and being deployed by one of the world’s
largest toll-road operators (Brisa).
Finally,
in our recently awarded Singapore-based Future Urban Mobility research program,
we aim to integrate:
• information and communication technologies,
• advanced integrated microsimulation
models (short-, medium-, long-term), and
• the policy, planning, institutional and financial
framework necessary to create a sustainable
21st Century urban mobility system.
I
won’t belabor the sustainability rhetoric as we are all now well-familiar with
the concept. Instead, I’d like to focus
on the need for MEASUREMENT. In short, proper measurement forces us to
ask: what are we trying to sustain
and how will we know we are moving in the right direction?
As
you, Mr. Secretary, have pointed out, we are talking about safe and affordable,
and sustainable
accessibility. Indeed, we have designed the Transportation@MIT
Initiative around the concept of accessibility – recognizing accessibility as
the fundamental objective of a sustainable mobility system.
This
introduces a key measurement task: how do we know we are moving in the right
direction when we talk about sustainability?
This is indeed new territory and we need a new measurement system, or:
The development and deployment of “metrics that matter”
This
implies standardized, meaningful, scale-able and operational performance
measures, capable of reflecting accessibility (in its multiple dimensions) on
the one hand, and life-cycle-based effects, based on full-cost accounting
principles, etc., on the other. We
expect to develop and demonstrate the use of such metrics as part of the SMART
Future Urban Mobility IRG.
Urban
mobility today must be Metropolitan in scope; metropolitan areas, after all,
account for the great majority of the country’s economy. However, we also must recognize that
metropolises are comprised of neighborhoods and municipalities – the specific
places where residents live and work – and amalgamate up to regional, national and
international networks of competition and innovation.
We
work on the neighborhood scale; for
example, here in Boston we have an ongoing research project examining how we can design
communities for older adults; as the baby boomers enter into later middle age,
can we design spaces for active, healthy, safe, secure, and
environmentally-friendly living?
But,
more generally, our work spans the globe, as it must, to extract comparative
lessons, find robust solutions, and prepare our students to work effectively in
a range of metropolitan contexts.
Of
course, we are a “northern” university; but much of our work is in the
so-called “global south”. In that sense,
we have as much (if not more) to learn as we do “wisdom” to impart.
For,
example, perhaps one of the most talked-about urban “innovations” to take the
urban transportation field by storm over the past decade or two is Bus Rapid Transit – an approach
pioneered in practice in the developing
world and only more recently beginning to see deployments in the US. We have recently been awarded, in a
consortium of partners from Latin America, Europe, and Australia, a grant from
the Volvo Research and Education Foundation (VREF) for a BRT Center of
Excellence – Across Latitudes and Cultures.
This global program will almost certainly bring benefits to the US BRT
“movement”, which can definitely learn from the affordable innovation and entrepreneurial spirit which so marks public
transportation systems in the global south.
Innovation weaves through the above principles. But, I’d like to call out two critical
dimensions here. First: innovative
pricing of the relevant resources; perhaps the most critical innovation that we
have been too slow to adopt into the U.S. system. I know DOT continues to work on ways in which tolling, pricing,
public-private partnerships (PPPs), and other financing mechanisms can be
integrated into the system. But, we need
bold political action on this front, and I’d challenge the Administration to
allow room for more local innovation in transportation finance, including,
perhaps, allowing an opt-out of the federal transportation finance system.
As
one example of relevant research here, again as part of MIT Portugal Research,
we have been examining precisely the institutional structures and related
arrangements that seem to be critical to the successful deployment of PPPs for
the delivery of urban transportation infrastructures.
MIT
has been at the forefront of transportation education for several decades. And, we are well-positioned to lead into the
21st Century, including by increasing our global partnerships to
make this happen. For example, via the
MIT Portugal Program we contributed to the successful development and launch of
an international professional MSc degree in Complex Transportation Infrastructure Systems, combining
the principles of engineering, business and public policy. In only its third full year of operation, we
are already attracting a large number of global, competitive students.
Here,
I’d like to make my only truly crass appeal of the morning: please increase the
Federal support for transportation graduate student fellowships, such as via
the Eisenhower
fellowships. Despite our best
efforts we can never raise enough money to fund all of our great graduate
students in transportation across the Institute.
We
are on the cusp of the metropolitan mobility revolution. Information
allows us new forms of intelligence
to drive the integration crucial to
urban metropolitan sustainability. To realize this potential, we must take a multi-scale approach, including via
increased global partnerships and collaborative research networks and
multi-setting experiments. This will
allow us to develop and pilot truly practical
innovations and educate the next
generation of global leaders in the sustainable mobility enterprise.
MIT
is actively involved in all elements of the puzzle necessary to realize this
ambition. So, if you believe in these
principles, we have a lot to offer in terms of partnerships with DOT, FHWA,
FTA, etc. in charting a path to sustainable urban mobility.