Understanding and Developing Equitable and Fair Transportation Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores how transportation systems can be designed and optimized to promote equity, safety, and efficiency, considering infrastructure, technology, and community development.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for analyzing and improving transportation systems with a focus on equity, integrating insights from infrastructure, demographics, and emerging vehicle technologies.

Findings

Road networks favor affluent areas over poor ones

Technological advancements offer new opportunities for equitable transportation

Initial steps toward an intelligent, fair transportation system

Abstract

The transportation system is an interplay between infrastructure, vehicles, and policy. During the past century, the rapid expansion of the road network, blended with increasing vehicle production and mobility demands, has been stressing the system's capacity and resulting in a shocking amount of annual costs. To alleviate these costs while providing passengers with safe and efficient travel experiences, we need to better design and plan our transportation system. To start with, not only the design of our road network is topologically flawed but also our infrastructure likely facilitates inequality: roads and bridges are found to better connect affluent sectors while excluding the poor. While technological advancements such as connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and novel operation modes such as shared economy have offered new opportunities, questions remain. First, what is the relationship between the road network, community development, demographics, and mobility behaviors? Second, by leveraging the insights from studying the first question, can we better plan, coordinate, and optimize vehicles in different modalities such as human-driven and autonomous to construct safe, efficient, and resilient traffic flows? Third, how can we build an intelligent transportation system to promote equity and fairness in our community development? This proposal is the first step toward answering these questions.