Author Archives: Joseph Chow

New research explains the relationship between bike lane investments and Citi Bike ridership in NYC

As smart cities find ways to work with mobility operators, one of the questions that spring to mind is the relationship between infrastructure investments and mobility service ridership. Susan Xu used time series models to monitor the attribution of bike lane investments on Citi Bike ridership over time to provide decision support to NYC DOT. For example, each mile of bike lane investment in Manhattan in the period of study contributed to 285 more bikeshare trips. The research was funded by NSF CMMI-1634973. Link to the paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15568318.2019.1645921

World Economic Forum white paper includes BUILT research

The World Economic Forum recently published a white paper to provide guidelines for governing Shared Electric and Automated Mobility (SEAM) systems. The paper includes case studies from the BUILT@NYU lab. Press release from WEF:

https://www.weforum.org/press/2019/07/shared-and-electric-vehicles-not-autonomous-should-be-first-steps-in-helping-cities-tackle-congestion-and-decrease-emissions

White paper can be found here:

https://www.weforum.org/whitepapers/shared-electric-and-automated-mobility-seam-governance-framework-prototype-for-north-america-and-europe

Publication on privacy control to support smart city data exchanges

As cities move toward “smart city” paradigms they will engage more and more with private mobility operators. Examples of these efforts include the Mobility Data Specification from LA DOT. Data sharing for such ecosystems require mechanisms to preserve the competitive privacy of operators’ operational policies. In our latest paper, we develop one such mechanism using concepts of constrained entropy maximization and inverse optimization constraints to ensure synthetic queries exhibit certain desirable features. This work will be presented at ISTTT23 in Lausanne and is funded by NSF CMMI-1652735. 

Link to paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X1831622X

New publication on transit-MOD integrated system

Recent news suggest the importance of studying the roles of public transit and mobility-on-demand services in competition and cooperation. We developed an integrated dynamic platform that can incorporate transit rides as a leg in the MOD service and showed that for certain scenarios (such as Manhattan trips from Long Island via LIRR) the MOD services will naturally converge to providing feeder access because it is more cost-effective. Joint work (NYU/LISER) with Tai-Yu Ma, Saeid Rasulkhani, and Sylvain Klein. Funding support from the Luxembourg National Research Fund (INTER/MOBILITY/17/11588252) and NSF CMMI-1634973.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tre.2019.07.002

New publication on reinforcement learning in route selection

A major issue in the development of reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles is the need to make them reflect the preferences of travelers better. One of the ways to do that is to incorporate user schedule preferences under reliability-based route selection criteria into the learning mechanism. This work led by Jinkai Zhou investigates the potential of such an integration. We used data collected from queries from Google Maps to mimic airport shuttle services to train a multi-armed bandit algorithm to see how it is impacted by the consideration of on-time arrival reliability. The work was funded by NSF CMMI-1652735.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0361198119850457

New research for evaluating Mobility-as-a-Service systems

Mobility-as-a-Service will only work if cities can evaluate markets of multiple operators, and consider not just ridership but also the incentives for transferring costs (fares, access/egress, wait time, in-vehicle time) between operators and travelers. Saeid Rasulkhani and Dr. Chow just published a new modeling framework that explicitly considers these trade-offs, developed with funding from NSF (CMMI-1634973). 

Link to paper: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trb.2019.04.008

C2SMART research to be presented at INFORMS TSL Workshop in Vienna

Research from the BUILT lab on “Doubly-constrained rebalancing for one-way electric carsharing systems with capacitated charging stations”, from Ted Pantelidis, Li Li (NYUAD), Tai-Yu Ma (LISER), Joseph Chow, and Saif Jabari (NYUAD) has been accepted for presentation at the INFORMS TSL Workshop in Vienna. The workshop’s theme is ““Transportation in the sharing economy”. The project is funded by C2SMART with data shared by BMW ReachNow.

Preliminary work for this project was previously presented at the 98th Annual Meeting of the TRB in Washington DC.

BUILT Lab to present NSF research at TRISTAN X at Hamilton Island

The work from student researchers Saeid Rasulkhani and Ted Pantelidis will be presented at the Tenth Triennial Symposium on Transportation Analysis (TRISTAN X) on June 17-21 at Hamilton Island near the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The NSF-funded (CMMI-1634973) research is entitled “A many-to-many stable matching cost allocation model for multimodal Mobility-as-a-Service”, where we develop a novel methodology to extend earlier work to handle cost allocation analysis for multiple operators splitting a traveler’s trip. This ongoing work has resulted in major breakthroughs in facilitating design of integrated services between different operators and transport agencies within a true “Mobility-as-a-Service” setting, providing to them a tool like how the classic “traffic assignment problem” helped roadway planning in the last few decades. We are finalizing our computational experiments and will be submitting this to a journal for publication.

Nick Caros’ work featured in a TEDx talk by NEXT co-founder Tommaso Gecchelin

Nick’s thesis work, which involves simulation of en-route transfers to better understand their impacts under different transit operating strategies, was recently featured in a TEDx TUM talk by Tommaso Gecchelin, a co-founder of NEXT Future Transportation.

Nick Caros was a MS student in the Transportation Planning & Engineering program in the Department of Civil & Urban Engineering. He worked as a research assistant in the BUILT lab through funding from C2SMART and completed his MS degree with a thesis in January 2019. He has one conference proceeding and 2 manuscripts under peer review in international journals from his time here.