Principal Investigator William Green
Co-investigators Jinhua Zhao , Sarah Williams , Chintan Vaishnav , Jessica Trancik , Yossi Sheffi , Noelle Selin , Sertac Karaman , Russ Tedrake , John Leonard , Daniela Rus , Yuriy Román , Carlo Ratti , Sergey Paltsev , Kent Larson , Richard Roth , Randolph Kirchain , Jason Jackson , Christopher Caplice , Moshe Ben-Akiva , Steven Barrett , Hari Balakrishnan , Sanjay Sarma
Project Website http://mobilitysystemscenter.mit.edu/
Mobility is changing in response to advanced technologies, disruptive business models, evolving demographics, changing consumer demands and government policy. Future changes are anticipated but there is great uncertainty about the pace of change and how mobility systems will evolve in different parts of the world. Current mobility systems and infrastructure are highly heterogeneous and driven by local factors such as energy security, growth, wealth, pollution, landforms and national priorities. MIT has extensive research activities underway in many dimensions of mobility, and there is an opportunity to construct an MIT mobility research program to collaborate with a consortium of organizations to tackle questions regarding future mobility systems.
To this end, the MIT Energy Initiative will inaugurate the Mobility Systems Center, a new MITEI Low- Carbon Energy Center, in early 2019. This is in response to existing sponsors of the Mobility of the Future study who have asked MITEI to continue and build upon the foundation of work started under the Mobility of the Future study and MITEI’s recognition that mobility is an important and dynamic component of the energy sector. As such, MITEI intends to set up the Mobility Systems Center to analyze future trends in the transportation sector and their impacts on society and environment. For this purpose, the center will develop, maintain, and apply a set of state-of-the-art scientific tools for the mobility sector. The insights obtained from this effort will be applied to guide efficient and sustainable development of future mobility across the globe. The center will be structured as a consortium in which all members fund the work and all members benefit from the insights and analyses from this Center.
The Mobility of the Future study, which began in 2016, covered many dimensions of the mobility space, but gave primary attention to USA and China, light-duty vehicles with 4 wheels, movement of people, urban mobility, electrification, and greenhouse gas policies. The Mobility Systems Center will have a broader scope and will be designed to evolve in response to the expressed needs of the consortium. This prospectus covers the proposed core themes for the Center for its first three years (2019-2022). The prospectus also lays out the mechanisms by which the consortium members participate in the annual project selection process and how the research themes are adjusted beyond this first 3-year period. Lastly, this prospectus identifies many of the research teams that will be invited to join this research program via the competitive project selection process.
The Center will focus on 5 research areas during Years 1-3: (1) Global mobility growth driven by developing countries (2) Global energy demand of freight is large and growing (3) Air quality in urban areas becomes an increasing concern (4) Disruptors offer the potential to revolutionize mobility patterns (5) Continue work from MIT’s Mobility of the Future study: Mobility with light-duty vehicles and urban mobility in regions including the U.S. and Europe