Principal Investigator Kent Larson
Project Website http://www.media.mit.edu/projects/mod/overview/
Facing the rapid growth of urban population around the world, cities are striving to improve livability by way of reducing dependency on fossil-fuels and private cars. At the same time, cities seek the ability to provide people with efficient and equitable access to socio-economic opportunities.
Boosted by these goals, the private sector largely posits the self-driving and electric cars as the messianic solution to an urban challenge that is, in reality, far more complex and diverse than the world viewed from a car seat—as a result of urbanization having outpaced the innovation in transportation. Meanwhile, the sharing, on-demand model using connected vehicles has gone mainstream, human-scale, and increasingly electrified, from cars (e.g. ZipCar, Car2Go) to bicycles (e.g. Hubway, MoBike).
Beneath this zeitgeist of “Mobility Revolution," however, there remains a lack of consideration for the needed participation of the public sector, for the questionable suitability of automobiles in the emerging urban context, or for the unintended negative externalities that may arise (eg. sprawl autonomous congestions). As such, the City Science group proposes a holistic research framework encompassing five themes: