MIT Mobility Initiative

The MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI) is thankful to all its speakers, followers and viewers for a very successful Mobility Forum Fall 2024 season hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao. We covered a wide range of topics, were honored to host a very diverse and distinguished set of speakers and as always, had a hyperactive forum chat bustling with comments, questions, new research and feedback. Stay tuned over the next month as we come out with new announcements. We wish you all a happy new year and see you for the Spring 2025 session! All the episodes/slides (where applicable) have been uploaded and are available on our forum page - https://lnkd.in/eHG4YvN7 Dec 13 - The Dilemma of Transport Planning and a Possible Alternative Urban Vision - Kay Axhausen, ETH Zürich Dec 6 - MMI Senior Fellows 2024 Presentation - Alex Mitchell, David Zipper, Laura Fox Nov 22 - The Future Takes Shape - Tom O'Leary, JetZero Nov 15 - Sustainable Batteries for Mobile Applications - Mircea Dinca, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nov 8 - Five Recommendations for Incoming Transportation Leadership - Beth Osborne, Transportation For America & Stephen Zoepf, ex-U.S. Department of Transportation Nov 1 - Vehicle Performance Trends and their Safety Implications - Bhuvan Atluri & John Moavenzadeh | MIT Mobility Initiative Oct 25 - MIT Mobility Vision Day - Special Session on Autonomous Mobility - Xiaodi Hou ,(Bot Auto) Henry Liu, Raquel Urtasun Oct 18 - Machine Learning Applications in Land Use and Travel Behavior Analysis - Jason Cao, University of Minnesota Oct 11 - Safety Assessment for Autonomous Vehicles - Henry Liu, Mcity, University of Michigan Oct 4 - LiDAR and Photonics in Transportation - Jelena Notaros, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sep 27 - Public Transit is an Investment not a Cost: Perspectives from UITP - Mohamed Mezghani Sep 20 - Reflections on the Growing Field of Transport and Health - Daniel Rodriguez, University of California, Berkeley Sep 13 - Transportation Megaprojects: Global Hits and Misses - John Landis, University of Pennsylvania Sep 6 - Bringing Generative AI to the Physical World : Insights from Waabi - Raquel Urtasun

Transportation accounts for 29% of US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Most American investments and policies in transportation focus on transitioning the existing vehicle fleet, especially passenger cars, from the internal combustion engine (ICE) to electric. An alternative approach would be to encourage a modal shift from passenger cars altogether towards low-carbon micromobility modes - everything from bikes to a wide variety of battery-boosted small devices like e-bikes and e-scooters. Read 2024 MIT Mobility Initiative Senior Fellow Alex Mitchell's research briefing on Scaling Private Sector Investment in and Government Support for Micromobility in the US to learn more. Click here -> https://lnkd.in/eWWbd2R6

The MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI) is delighted to announce the fifteenth and final episode of the MIT Mobility Forum Fall 2024 hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao. Forum Title: The Dilemma of Transport Planning and a Possible Alternative Urban Vision Speaker: Kay Axhausen, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, ETH Zürich What is next when business as usual (BAU) doesn’t work anymore? The talk will reflect about the absence of a positive vision in transport policy, which can achieve the climate goals. Central is the idea of an “e-bikecity” and its possible contribution. The talk will also raise the question, if we need clear numerical targets to manage the current constraints. Fridays 12:00-13:00 ET, Aug 30 - Dec 13, 2024 The MIT Mobility Forum is open to the public. Please register here - https://lnkd.in/gGtR3gG7

The MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI) is pleased to invite applicants for our 2025 cohort of MMI Senior Fellows. Applications are due January 17, 2025. More information on the program here - https://lnkd.in/gJCp6TvW Applications can be submitted here - https://lnkd.in/gs7px6eG

The MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI) is delighted to announce the fourteenth episode of the MIT Mobility Forum Fall 2024 hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao. Forum Title: MMI Senior Fellows Presentation 1. Laura Fox: Deploying Non-Dilutive Capital to Scale Early-Stage Urban Mobility Climate Investments 2. Alex Mitchell: Scaling Private Sector Investment in and Government Support for Micromobility in the US 3. David Zipper: Marketing Electric Vehicles– Which Metrics Make Sense? We welcome you to join us to hear presentations from our 2024 MMI Senior Fellows who have each produced a research briefing that addresses a timely and important research question aligned with our mission to accelerate safe, clean, and inclusive mobility. Fridays 12:00-13:00 ET, Aug 30 - Dec 13, 2024 The MIT Mobility Forum is open to the public. Please register here - https://lnkd.in/gGtR3gG7

The MIT Mobility Initiative and MIT JTL-Transit Lab has openings for visiting graduate students in the 2025-2026 academic year! We are seeking students with a wide range of backgrounds, including but not limited to, econometrics/statistics, machine learning/AI, operations research, transportation engineering, transportation energy modeling and urban planning/management. Applications close on December 20th, 2024. Apply here - https://lnkd.in/en5WgPUU. Find out more at: https://lnkd.in/eQid4gGY.

The MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI) is delighted to announce the thirteenth episode of the MIT Mobility Forum Fall 2024 hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao. Forum Title: The Future Takes Shape Speaker: Tom O'Leary, Co-founder and CEO, JetZero Tom will speak to the virtuous cycle that JetZero’s blended wing body airplane creates. The shape of the airplane enables more of everything we want and less of everything we don’t. This means more space in the cabin, more efficiency, more choices. Less emissions, less fuel, less boarding stress. Fridays 12:00-13:00 ET, Aug 30 - Dec 13, 2024 The MIT Mobility Forum is open to the public. Please register here - https://lnkd.in/gGtR3gG7

The MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI) is delighted to announce the twelfth episode of the MIT Mobility Forum Fall 2024 hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao. Forum Title: Sustainable Batteries for Mobile Applications Speaker: Mircea Dinca, W. M. Keck Professor of Energy, MIT Eliminating the use of critical transition metals in Li-ion battery cathodes is a key challenge for electrifying the transportation sector, especially in consumer vehicles. Vast resources are expended for replacing cobalt or minimizing the nickel content in commercial batteries, yet all rely on controlled doping of other elements (e.g. Mo, Mg, Ti, Mn, Nb) into ternary oxides to balance energy, power, safety, and cycling lives of such cathodes. An alternative strategy is to completely move away from inorganic oxides and use redox active organic materials, composed of just carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, as cathodes. Despite the longstanding interest in developing organic cathodes, they generally perform poorly under practical conditions due to their relatively high solubility in battery electrolytes, which saps their cycle life, and low intrinsic electrical conductivity, which imposes needs for large amounts of additives and binders. Here, we will describe the use of TAQ, a new organic molecule that is a competitive cathode for Li-ion batteries. Made from just C, N, O, and H has higher energy density than incumbent commercial metal oxides at any charge-discharge rate, and maintains high capacity over thousands of cycles. Time-allowing, we will discuss environmental implications of transitioning from inorganic cathodes to organic materials. Fridays 12:00-13:00 ET, Aug 30 - Dec 13, 2024 The MIT Mobility Forum is open to the public. Please register here - https://lnkd.in/gGtR3gG7

The MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI) is delighted to announce the eleventh episode of the MIT Mobility Forum Fall 2024 hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao. Forum Title: Five Recommendations for Incoming Transportation Leadership The start of a new Administration offers the opportunity to establish new priorities, and a new Surface Transportation Re-authorization in two years will allocate billions of dollars of Federal funds towards specific modes, technologies and regions. In this talk, Jinhua Zhao will have a discussion with Stephen Zoepf (formerly USDOT) and Beth Osborne (Director, Transportation for America). We will discuss five high level issues facing the nation’s transportation system and some possible steps incoming transportation teams in the executive and legislative branches might take to address them. Fridays 12:00-13:00 ET, Aug 30 - Dec 13, 2024 The MIT Mobility Forum is open to the public. Please register here - https://lnkd.in/gGtR3gG7

The MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI) is delighted to announce the tenth episode of the MIT Mobility Forum Fall 2024 hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao. Forum Title: Vehicle Performance Trends and their Safety Implications After many decades of healthy decline, deaths in the US due to motor vehicle crashes started rising again around 2015. This increase is both in absolute numbers and deaths per million miles. Many factors are being blamed for the increases in fatalities – drivers distracted by their phones, heavier cars, higher car hood heights, distracted pedestrians, more active modes of mobility mixing with car traffic, roads that are designed purely for throughput of cars and not access for pedestrians or cyclists, to name a few. While we cannot assess all of these factors in one hour, this presentation will focus on MMI research that takes a data-driven look the performance characteristics of the current fleet of Light Duty Vehicles (LDVs) across key parameters such as acceleration in seconds (0 - 60 mph), braking in feet (70 mph - 0) of various powertrains, body types, sizes, MSRP, and Curb Weights to arrive at insights that can be used by both consumers in making more informed decisions and by policy-makers in designing a transport funding and regulatory framework that takes current vehicle trends and road safety into account. Fridays 12:00-13:00 ET, Aug 30 - Dec 13, 2024 The MIT Mobility Forum is open to the public. Please register here - https://lnkd.in/gGtR3gG7