Online Courses

People, Technology and the Future of Mobility

This course by Michigan Online offers “a lay-person’s introduction to some of the major technological innovations currently underway in the mobility space and asks learners to apply a variety of social science concepts to understand the likely social impacts of these technologies.”

Planning for Autonomous Vehicles: A People-Centred Approach (updated)

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) Urban Mobility Academy’s course focuses on the potential of autonomous vehicles and strategies to incorporate them into a sustainable and people-centered approach to urban planning.

Leveraging Urban Mobility Disruptions to Create Better Cities

This course by MITx explores topics related to emerging new mobility systems. Students “learn how new mobility can be leveraged to address and promote equity, improve health outcomes, and increase accessibility.”

Webinars

Navigating the first-last mile in a seamless way is crucial to expand public transit ridership. Through creating more viable, integrated bike share and transit transit options, this NACTO webinar provides best practices from bike share / transit operators in Pittsburgh and Milwaukee. This webinar also provides guidance on shared-service messaging, enhanced customer experience, and technical applications that lead to a mutual, supportive bike share-transit relationship.

This Shared Use Mobility Center panel explores shared-car usage models. From local non-profits to public entities, strategically performing outreach and forming strong partnerships and breaking down silos are crucial to getting single-occupancy vehicles off the road, reducing emissions, and even subsidizing car-rental rates for lower income users. By teaming up with public transit operators and micromobility operators, carsharing entities can effectively deploy, integrate, and develop organic mobility hubs.

This Shared Use Mobility Center interview shares lessons learned from Delaware Transit Corporation’s on-demand DART Connect service. Bruce Demeter, the Chief of Performance and Innovation, shares about the success of and challenges of providing connectivity to two service areas in Sussex County, transitioning away from a fixed route system to micro-transit, and how this on-demand transit can increase social equity.

This Shared Use Mobility Center conversation explores how modern mobility services can expand access, affordability, and usage. Expanding GTFS information to include vehicle accessibility information, pick-up coordination, and volunteer transportation providers could expand access. In addition to economic incentives to use transit with on-demand ridesharing, ensuring on-demand transit and paratransit data is open-source increases inclusivity and provides more trip planning options and access to seamless transportation information.

This UC Institute of Transportation Studies webinar highlights creating a transportation safety net through universal basic mobility.  A Los Angeles Metro Mobility Wallet Pilot reveals usage is most frequent in low-income, car-light households. Through providing new opportunities to take multi-modal trips, participants are able to make essential trips they never would have before and improve their quality of life.

With health outcomes and equity impacted by socioeconomic status and environmental conditions, autonomous vehicles and shared mobility could improve transportation access, safety, and air quality. In this UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies webinar, active transportation has provided net public health benefits and reducing a sedentary lifestyle. Additionally, accessibility barriers in ridesharing, micro-mobility, and AV deployment must be addressed, and these investments should be prioritized in disadvantaged and traffic-violent communities.

With the rapid growth of e-commerce and urban delivery traffic, this UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies webinar considers the efficacy of a crowdsourced model of delivering the last mile of consumer goods. Similar to UberEats, this model eliminates the need for full-time employees, company owned vehicle assets, and provides cost savings without the need for as many trucks on the road. By downsizing the last mile of deliveries to private automobiles, this study shows this model has potential to right-size urban and suburban consumer goods’ delivery.

This UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies webinar explores the implications of AV liability, insurance, and policymaking. Currently, with 93% of all crashes attributable to human driver error, AV deployment disrupts this status quo and could open up the vehicle and manufacturer themselves to liability. Additionally, communicating these complex systems to juries and policy makers has the potential to further inform how decisions and precedent is made.

Strong public-private partnerships are the critical path to improving Mobility as a Services, hared mobility, and lowering emissions. This Shared Use Mobility Center discussion brings insight into digital information interoperability and best practices surrounding a unified transport app. In addition to oversight, ensuring third-party data compliance and constantly evolving data standards, many mobility providers can be harmonized onto one user interface, providing more mobility options for the consumer.

With the introduction of heavy-duty, connected and electric trucks, this innovation can improve traffic safety, efficiency, and air quality. With mass adoption, smoother truck operations, traffic flow, and platoons can lead to a reduction in human-created bottlenecks and traffic, freeing up capacity on the highway system. Connected Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) trucks could safely allow for less braking distance, higher speeds, and less energy consumption. The UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies webinar concludes that in a I-710 freeway case study, it is more cost effective to replace trucks with their electric counterparts than to finance lane widening, as their efficiency reduces congestion and relieves capacity.