This lecture will be focused on the potential impact of Connected and Automated Smart Transportation Systems (CASTS) on our activity-travel behavior, community and regional design/planning, built infrastructure development, transportation policies, and, at a more fundamental level, human activity-travel decision making. How may our activity participations and activity-travel patterns change, and how may city designs and land-use planning elements change to respond to changes in individual activity choices? Key questions remain on how autonomous vehicles in particular may affect travel. Will autonomous vehicles lead to reduced parking needs, and reclamation of vast patches of urban areas that are currently invested in parking garages and other parking infrastructure? Will these vehicles expand people’s willingness to be in a car through reduced stress and ability to do other tasks, thereby increasing commute-sheds and leading to sprawled cities? Will people continue to own personal cars, and start purchasing larger vehicles because they spend more time in autonomous vehicles? Or will a new ownership paradigm emerge in which people don’t own cars, but rather buy transportation services by the mile from fleet companies? Will such a sharing economy lead to the use of smaller electric vehicles? Will there be more trips and more long trips? The speaker will discuss many of these issues. While there is still a great deal of uncertainty regarding impacts, this presentation will identify key emerging considerations for infrastructure and community planning.
About the speaker
Prof. Chandra R. Bhat received his PhD in Civil Engineering from Northwestern University in 1991. He began his academic career there as an Assistant Professor before moving to University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1993. In 1997, Prof. Bhat joined the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin, where he became a full Professor in 2005. He is currently the Joe J. King Chair in Engineering, Director of the Data-Supported Transportation Operations and Planning Center (D-STOP) and the Adnan Abou-Ayyash Centennial Professor in Transportation Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where he holds a joint appointment at the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Economics.
Prof. Bhat is a world-leading expert in the area of travel demand modeling and travel behavior analysis. His current research includes the social and environmental implications of transportation, planning implications of Connected and Automated Smart Transportation Systems (CASTS), data science and predictive analytics for transportation policy analysis and forecasting.
Prof. Bhat’s research is well recognized through numerous awards, including 2015 Frank M. Masters Transportation Engineering Award, 2005 James Laurie Prize and 2004 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, and Associate Editor of Analytic Methods in Accident Research. He also served on the editorial boards of Transportation in Developing Economies, EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics and Transportation Letters: The International Journal of Transportation Research. He is also one of the top researchers of transportation engineering in terms of citations.
