Prof. P Christopher Zegras

Professor Zegras's research is driven by the fundamental sustainable mobility challenge: how can we maintain the capability to provide non-declining accessibility over time? Accessibility -- individuals’ abilities to fulfill the daily needs and desires necessary to survive and thrive -- is key to human development. How can we increase society’s accessibility levels, thereby increasing human development potentials, while reducing or eliminating the wide-ranging negative impacts, short- and long-term, that modern mobility systems impose on us, our ecosystems, and future generations?

Zegras focuses on three broad, inter-related areas critical to answering this question:

(1) improving our understanding of the dynamic relationships between human behavior and the built, social, and natural environments;

(2) devising and demonstrating new planning approaches, with the goal of producing more robust strategies for sustainability in the face of uncertainty; and

(3) identifying viable pathways, through the complex institutional settings of the modern metropolis, to implement change.

Increasingly as part of the above work, he explores the role of mobile communication and computation technologies as a new data source for estimating and validating models, as a tool for changing behaviors within the mobility system itself, and as a way to improve citizen engagement in planning processes.