With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, frontline workers in all areas of retail, from consumer goods to restaurants to hotels, have been especially hard hit. How should we rethink jobs in retail to address the real and human concerns of workers, while at the same time creating better outcomes for employers? How can better job design create good jobs with higher productivity? How do we address the nearly “voiceless” work relationship retail workers have with their employers? How can a better workforce education system create better quality jobs? Join us, as MIT’s leading experts in retail explore the critical issues and possible new workforce scenarios of The New Retail.
City governments and planners alike commonly seek to increase pedestrian activity on city streets as part of broader sustainability, community building and economic development strategies. Though walkability has received ample attention in planning literature, most practitioners still lack methods and tools for predicting how development proposals could impact pedestrian activity on specific streets or public spaces at different times of the day. Cities typically require traffic impact assessments, but not pedestrian impact assessments. In this presentation I discuss a methodology for estimating pedestrian trip generation and distribution between detailed origins and destinations in both existing and planned built environments. I demonstrate its application in Cambridge, MA and Melbourne, Australia, where I compare estimated foot-traffic during lunch and evening peak periods to observed pedestrian counts and show how the model can be used to predict changes in foot-traffic that results from changes in real-estate development.
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Mobility and transportation are at the dawn of the most profound changes with an unprecedented combination of new technologies (autonomy, computation, and AI) meeting new and evolving priorities and objectives (decarbonization, public health, and social justice). And the timeframe for these changes – decarbonization in particular – is short in a system with massive amounts of fixed, long-life assets and entrenched behaviors and cultures. It’s this combination of new technologies, new purposes, and urgent timeframes that makes an MIT-led Mobility Initiative critical at this moment.
The MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI) is designed to effect fundamental changes in the longterm trajectory of sustainable mobility development. It serves to coalesce all mobility and transportation activities at MIT, knitting together our efforts on research, education, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement at the Institute into a greater whole. This series of webinars will highlight just a few of the key research areas to be explored. We will also discuss how industry can participate in the MMI as a research partner through the MIT Mobility Initiative Consortium.