In Fall 2015, the JTL hosted 23 graduate students presentations on current and developing research on transportation policy and user behavior. The course, taught in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning as "Transportation Research Design: How Are Ideas Born?," is focused on discussing and refining student-led research projects and publications. Many of the same research themes will carry into the Spring 2016 seminar convened by the JTL.
Regulating Motorization
Purposeful Policy Leakage: Intentional Lapses in Transport Policy Enforcement
Nick B. Allen
In transportation, design and management costs are directed to thwarting “policy leakage,” a gap between policy enforcement and user compliance. Though noncompliance is often seen as purposeful, cases of non-enforcement are overwhelming treated as unintentional. This paper formulates reasons why non-enforcement of transport policy can be desirable, focusing on the Shanghai non-local license regimes as one such case of “purposeful policy leakage.”
Normative and Image Motivations for Transportation Policy Compliance
Jake Gao
Policies that appeal to car owners’ motivations to comply with sustainable transportation policies could yield higher rates of compliance. A case study of Shanghai’s local vehicle licensing policy finds normative beliefs and image-based motivations more strongly determine users’ willingness to comply with car use restrictions than instrumental reasons like avoiding fines. However, motivations for compliance vary by users’ sociodemographic characteristics, especially residency status (hukou).
Motorization in China: Demand and Policy
Paul Kishimoto
By nationalizing income-based vehicle demand and omitting local demand management policies, forecasts of China’s motorization may overstate similarities to historical patterns elsewhere. An investigation of interregional differences in vehicle demand and local car restrictions establishes a more behavior- and policy-sensitive model of China’s automotive future.
Behavioral responses to Guangzhou’s car plate regulation: Lottery or Auction?
Shenhao Wang
Psychological factors like probability, framing effects, free choice, and loss aversion play a critical role in the reception of transport policies. In a case study of Guangzhou’s car license allocation, we study how these factors impel Guangzhou citizens to overwhelmingly prefer a lottery to an auction.
Public engagement, advocacy and equity
Advancing Accessibility: Spatial Foundations and Possibilities of Urban Transit Planning
Anson Stewart
Connectivity measures are widely used to model the wider social, economic, and physical impacts of transport projects, but rarely outside of expert studies. This project explores how interactive, map-based explorations of connectivity measures can be a basis for stakeholder engagement, and how ignoring capacity constraints may distort these measures.
Using Reflective Practice to Reveal Adaptive Tactics Used by Advocates during Public Policy Implementation Process: Boston “Complete Streets” Case Study
Jeffrey Rosenblum
Local policy advocacy organizations lack understanding of the most effective tactics that should be used to achieve their objectives of shifting public policy. This paper argues that the relationship between advocate and government needs to change from adversarial to collaborative, through a case study highlighting successful strategies employed by the advocacy organization, LivableStreets Alliance, to push for “Complete Streets” transportation policies.
Can We Increase Policy Acceptance By Informing The Public? Policy Knowledge And Attitude Of License Plate Auction In Shanghai
Menghan Li
Low levels of public acceptance inhibit transportation demand management policies, but it is unclear how received knowledge of such policies shapes public opinion. With respect to the Shanghai license plate auction, greater knowledge of the policy's driving restrictions is negatively correlated with positive attitudes towards the policy, with the least positive attitudes found among those unable to bid on licenses at all.
TOD as an Agent for Equity in the Planning of Detroit’s Future
Lindiwe Rennert
Detroit remains one of the most segregated and unequal cities in the United States. As planners begin to recognize transit access as a critical justice issue, transit-oriented development strategies may become a vital agent of equity planning in the Detroit metropolitan area.
Sensing and Modeling Mobility Behavior
Using Mobile Activity Tracking Data with Oyster to Understand Travel Behavior
Timothy Scully
The ubiquity of smartphone allows for new and innovative ways to understand travel behavior. Specifically, an emerging set of mobile activity tracking applications create automatic travel diaries based on gps and phone sensor data. Using this mobile activity tracking data with more traditional data sources, we show how we can better understand travel pattern, especially for non-public transit modes.
Better, Quicker, Together: A Smartphone-based Platform for Real-Time Transit Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction Sensing
Corinna Li
Using smartphones and iBeacons, we enable real-time detection of passengers’ bus trips and collect trip-specific customer feedback to help transit agencies improve their service and build better relationships with customers.
Measuring Explicit and Implicit Social Status Bias in Car vs. Bus Mode Choice
Joanna Moody
Traditional transportation survey methods can capture self-reported preferences, but not necessarily instinctive perceptions or subconscious biases. Psychological instruments that gauge implicit bias reveal stronger social status biases for car use and against bus use among respondents than reported in traditional survey methods. These implicit biases are significant predictors of users’ actual mode choices, whereas self-reported biases are not.
Applying Demand Models to Travel Behaviors in Virtual Worlds
Jintai Li
Revisiting the four-step model of forecasting travel demand, we find discrepancies between its assumptions and “actual realities” of travel behavior. Furthermore, while virtual worlds completely violate some assumptions about travel behavior in the service of satisfying gameplay, they mimic other assumptions more closely than actual worlds.
The Upsides of Commuting: How Attitudes and Experiences Affect Travel Disutility
Adam Rosenfield
While commuting is often seen as wasted time, research suggests individuals also gain value from travel and do not always seek to minimize it. The positive utility of travel, derived from both travel activities and the very experience of mobility itself, is explored through a nationwide survey of attitudes and perceptions across transportation modes.
Extracting Sequential Patterns of Individual Mobility in London Underground from Transit Smartcard Data using Language Models
Zhan Zhao
In public transportation, user-specific predictive analytics are important for personalized information provision (e.g. recommendations, navigations, travel alerts), policy impact analysis, and customer behavioral nudging. We propose new methods for predicting future tap-in and tap-out sequences at London Underground using Oyster records by applying language models, i.e. treating each station as a word and modeling tap sequences as sentences.
Travel and Administrative Boundaries: Spatial Hierarchy and Urban-Rural Differences in Travel Patterns of a Chinese City’s Residents
Saul Wilson
China scholars have long observed a hierarchical relation of travel from rural to urban areas. This study tests the extent to which this model remains valid, and whether administrative boundaries and designations reflect the actual travel patterns.
Environment and Energy in Transportation Systems
How Much Does Gas Price Elasticity of Travel Demand Vary? Mining the Massachusetts Vehicle Census for Lessons for Transportation Emissions Policy
Philip Kreycik
Gas taxes are viewed as an effective strategy to reduce private vehicle demand and internalize its costs, but distributive impacts and social equity of gas taxes are not well understood. Spatial analysis of Massachusetts Vehicle Census finds that transit-accessible and low-income towns are most sensitive to gas price hikes, whereas low-density, wealthy, and long-commute towns are relatively unresponsive.
MIT ESI Clearer Skies in Beijing: Collecting and Interpreting Relevant Spatiotemporal Data for Air Quality Assessment
Zelin Li
To address China’s urban air pollution problems and reduce risks, it is vital to understand how commuters perceive air quality and respond to their perceptions. A smartphone-based survey instrument tracks commuters and asks them to judge air quality in order to relate user perceptions to sensor measurements.
Energy Consumption and Economic Decoupling in China: A Cluster Analysis of Provincial Data
Vishnu Prasad
Decoupling energy inputs from economic output is crucial to achieving energy security and decarbonization. Past studies have observed diminishing intensity in China’s economic production, but have neglected sub-national trends arising from imbalanced industrial structure and development pathways. A study of energy intensity over time at the provincial level will reveal the extent to which economic development patterns drive decoupling.
The Relationship between Air Pollution and Transit Ridership in Shanghai
Xin Zheng
Activity patterns and human behaviors are altered by severe air pollution. Combining Shanghai transit user data with air quality data reveals how air pollution impacts riders’ public transportation choices, including total ridership, mode choice, peak-hour shift, and congestion area.
Mobility Sharing, Culture and Recommendation
Using Individual and Societal Perceptions of Uber to Inform Urban Transportation Policymaking
Margo Dawes
Uber dominates the market for on-demand private transportation and the American cultural consciousness about the transportation sharing economy. Public attitudes towards Uber’s operation range from enthusiastic support to emphatic opposition. Using survey instruments, this thesis taps into those opinions and attitudes to reveal societal perceptions about ride-hailing apps and their role in the urban transportation market.
Adding Assortative Preferences to Ridesharing Models
Hongmou Zhang
Recent advances in information technology have drastically lowered the threshold for people to participate in ride-sharing programs. However, these models do not consider people’s assortative preferences for trip partners, which could enhance people’s willingness to share rides.
Bi-objective Location Recommendation System based on Call Detail Records: An Application in Andorra Tourism
Yan Leng
Recommendation systems, which match user preferences to consumption choices, could also be deployed to manage travel demand for popular events. The concept is tested on Andorra’s events schedule by matching users’ detected past interests to less-congested events, thereby reducing systemwide travel costs.
Mobility Culture Shifter: Community-based Mobilities and Cultures
David Wang
As Chinese cities grow, how might we engage people to create a culture around modes of urban mobility? By creating toolboxes for people and their communities to explore and shift their mobility, we can develop a more diverse set of values to shape China’s future mobility culture.