10-27-2023 ITS Weekly Seminar

TITLE: UC Davis as a Living-Learning Laboratory for Sustainable Transportation
SPEAKER: Kari Watkins, Associate Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering, UC Davis
ABSTRACT: The College of Engineering at UC Davis has four pillars of their Next Level Research - Revolutionizing Energy Systems, Strengthening Climate Resilience, Advancing Human Health and Transforming Mobility. But we at ITS know that it is possible to transform mobility while also advancing health, minimizing climate impacts and reducing the need for energy! Individual transportation contributes to emissions, obesity risk, and injury risk through crashes, but more sustainable modes of transportation like cycling and transit can reduce these impacts. A team tied to ITS just won a mini-grant from the College of Engineering to use UC Davis and City of Davis as a model of sustainable transportation to attract students and researchers. As the PI, Dr. Watkins is focused particularly on cycling and transit, but Davis as a model of sustainable transportation could go well beyond these modes. Dr. Watkins will start this talk with her past research to use sensing to understand cycling and transit flows. She will then discuss how through instrumentation of intersections on campus, the team hopes to observe cyclist interactions to better understand design of infrastructure for safe cycling; and how by instrumenting the bus fleet, the team hopes to provide better information to riders and understand where the system becomes unreliable. The broader vision includes sharing this data and the uniquely sustainable transportation system here in Davis to show the world how a sustainable multimodal transportation system can work. Come prepared to share your own ideas of how Davis could be a living-learning laboratory.