Category Archives: News

Service region design and fleet allocation model applied to NYC e-scooters

In this collab with Bronx High School of Science student Marco Giordano, we designed a service region and fleet allocation optimization model subject to elastic demand, applied to e-scooters. The tool can be combined with demand forecast models to identify spatial mobility service needs. A case study of Manhattan building on the earlier forecast model from Mina Lee shows there exist budget thresholds where a strategy should switch from zone expansion to fleet expansion. Should be of interest to micromobility companies and cities. 

C2SMART Center gets renewed by the USDOT for another 5 years

In the latest grant competition, 34 centers were awarded out of 230 applications submitted. Among those, 169 applications were for Tier 1 University Transportation Centers, of which only 20 were selected. The C2SMART Center (of which the BUILT Lab is belongs) was one of those.

In this renewal, the center is now “Connected Communities for Smart Mobility Toward Accessible and Resilient Transportation for Equitably Reducing Congestion” (C2SMARTER). New consortium members include CUNY NYCCT, NCAT, and Texas Southern U. The research priority has also shifted from Improving Mobility of People and Goods to Reducing Congestion. The funding amount is $2M per year, up to $10M over the next five years. Congrats to the team!

https://www.transportation.gov/utc/bil-centers-and-grantees

Procurement research for NYSDOT leads to successful award with ICF

NYSDOT solicited the help of Dr. Chow and the BUILT Lab at C2SMART in 2020 to conduct research in preparing first a Request for Information (RFI) and then an RFP. The goal of the RFP was to upgrade the current 511NYRideshare program into a next generation statewide program that would encompass more advanced technological capabilities and allow for emerging mobility options like micromobility, microtransit, carshare, mobility hubs, etc., making way for Mobility-as-a-Service.

Through the RFP process, NYSDOT successfully awarded a $29 million contract to global consulting and technology services provider ICF (NASDAQ: ICFI) to evolve this program. The press release for the award can be found on ICF’s page: https://www.icf.com/news/2023/02/new-york-state-awards-icf-29-million-transportation-contract.

Dr. Chow joins the Top 2% of Scientists in Logistics & Transportation (career-wide)

In the September 2022 data-update for “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators” by John Ioannidis (Stanford), career-long data are updated to end-of-2021 and single recent year data pertain to citations received during calendar year 2021. The selection is based on the top 100,000 scientists by c-score (with and without self-citations) or a percentile rank of 2% or above in the sub-field. In the “Logistics & Transportation” subfield across all years, Dr. Chow is now ranked 376th in citations as of the 2021 citation data, within the top 2% of the 19,216 scientists listed with this subfield as their primary field.

The original data can be accessed here: https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/4
The extracted top 2% list can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FFatMl_ZjG8jC-rFDLuRl0VpVpdzeBzD-hZrrt_pv_M/edit?usp=sharing

Eight papers accepted for presentation at TRB 2023

BUILT@NYU had eight papers accepted for presentation at the upcoming TRB Annual Meeting in Washington DC in January 2023. The papers represent topics including public transport, reinforcement learning, service region design, discrete choice modeling, last mile deliveries, electric vehicles, zone districting, network design, and Mobility-as-a-Service ecosystems.

Prof. Chow guest editing special issue for INSTR conference

With the 8th International Symposium on Transport Network Reliability (INSTR) ended, Prof. Chow is guest editing a special issue on Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics, with Oded Cats (TU Delft) and Sybil Derrible (U. Illinois-Chicago), on the topic of “Reliability and Resilience of Emerging Mobility Systems”. The submission deadline is September 30, 2021. More details about the call for papers can be found here:
https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/reliability-resilience-emerging-mobility-systems/