Workshop on Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusiveness in ITS

Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusiveness in ITS

This workshop aims to gather some technical presentations to stimulate discussion on how ITS impacts individual mobility choices and how new technologies can be exploited to design and regulate transport activities in order to ensure a more accessible, equitable and inclusive mobility system. This workshop is part of the diversity, equity, and inclusion activities and has been organized with the support of the Technical Committee of the IEEE ITS Society in “Planning and Control of Transportation and Logistics Networks”.

OVERVIEW

Mobility is a crucial factor in the social and economic development of societies. Indeed, our societies are built around the capability of moving people and goods easily. At the same time, new technologies, such as connected and automated vehicles and electric vehicles, as well as new transport paradigms, such as shared mobility and mobility as a service, are growing rapidly and promise the concrete realization of smart cities, i.e., cities that are environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable. In fact, the introduction of advanced technologies combined with the development of innovative methods of design, planning and control allow for a review of the current mobility paradigm, which is mainly based on the use of private cars and favors city centre mobility to the detriment of the suburbs, in order to promote more sustainable transport methods and ensure equitable access to city services. On the other hand, it is worth noting that the access to these new technologies and the implementation of these more efficient and environmentally friendly mobility paradigms is often the prerogative of the wealthiest populations, with the real risk of further widening the gap with the most disadvantaged.

The goal of this workshop is to stimulate discussion on how these transport methods and new technologies can be used to promote planning and control practices aimed at increasing social equity, inclusiveness, and accessibility of transport systems. The duration of the workshop is half a day and an attendance of about 20-30 participants is expected.

PROPOSED STRUCTURE OF THE WORKSHOP (TENTATIVE)

Andreas A. Malikopoulos, Cornell University, “A Mobility Equity Metric for Socially Optimal Emerging Mobility Systems”
Fabio Papparella, Eindhoven University of Technology, “On Equitable and Sustainable Mobility Systems”
Gioele Zardini, Stanford University, “Society-aware CoDesign of Mobility Systems”
Kenan Zhang, cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne, “A fair and efficient mechanism for traffic congestion management”
Maria Laura Delle Monache, University of California, Berkeley, “Equity-Focused Recovery for Urban Traffic Networks”
Tae J. Kwon, University of Alberta, “Towards Strategic and Equitable RWIS Network Planning and Management”

A Mobility Equity Metric for Socially Optimal Emerging Mobility Systems

Global urbanization and burgeoning urban populations impose several societal challenges associated with disparities in transportation opportunities, reduced accessibility to essential services for marginalized communities, and increased social isolation due to lengthy commutes. Although emerging mobility systems, e.g., connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), and shared mobility, provide the most intriguing opportunity to mitigate these challenges, research efforts have focused mainly on optimizing their operation efficiency in isolation without deliberating on human acceptance and perception. Addressing the societal issues inherent in emerging mobility systems remains largely uncharted territory. The core of these societal challenges lies in the unequal distribution of transportation modes and access to urban resources, giving rise to ”mobility equity.” While mobility equity has been studied from multiple perspectives, including socioeconomic parity, equitable spatial infrastructure allocation, and alignment of resource distribution with societal needs, a critical gap remains in integrating mobility equity principles into emerging transportation modes. In this talk, I will present a mobility equity metric (MEM) to quantify the accessibility and fairness in a transportation network consisting of CAVs and human-driven vehicles. I will then present a routing framework integrated with MEM that aims to distribute travel demand for the transportation network, resulting in a socially optimal mobility system. A socially optimal mobility system is defined to be a mobility system that (1) is efficient in terms of travel time, (2) improves accessibility, and (3) ensures equity in transportation. To accommodate compliant and noncompliant vehicles to the routing suggestions, the framework incorporates a cognitive hierarchy model commonly used in behavioral economics to predict human decisions in transportation systems. The proposed framework aims to bolster mobility equity by addressing transportation and resource access disparities.

Society-Aware Co-Design of Mobility Systems

When designing complex systems, we need to consider multiple trade-offs at various abstraction levels and scales, and choices of single components need to be studied jointly. For instance, the design of future mobility solutions (e.g., autonomous vehicles, micromobility) and the design of the mobility systems they enable are closely coupled. Indeed, knowledge about the intended service of novel mobility solutions would impact their design and deployment process, while insights about their technological development could significantly affect transportation management policies. Optimally co-designing sociotechnical systems is a complex task for at least two reasons. On one hand, the co-design of interconnected systems (e.g., large networks of cyber-physical systems) involves the simultaneous choice of components arising from heterogeneous natures (e.g., hardware vs. software parts) and fields, while satisfying systemic constraints and accounting for multiple objectives. On the other hand, components are connected via collaborative and conflicting interactions between different stakeholders (e.g., within an intermodal mobility system). In this talk, I will present a framework to co-design complex systems, leveraging a monotone theory of co-design and tools from game theory. The framework will be instantiated in the task of designing future mobility systems, all the way from the policies that a city can design, to the autonomy of vehicles as part of an autonomous mobility-on-demand service. Through various case studies, I will show how the proposed approaches allow one to efficiently answer heterogeneous questions, unifying different modeling techniques and promoting interdisciplinarity, modularity, and compositionality. I will then discuss open challenges for compositional systems design optimization, and present my agenda to tackle them.

Towards Strategic and Equitable RWIS Network Planning and Management

In cold climates where winter road maintenance is crucial, ensuring equitable access to safe roads is a significant challenge. Road Weather Information Systems (RWIS), considered one of the most critical highway Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) infrastructures, have been essential tools for effective winter maintenance. However, despite their proven benefits, their deployment is often limited by high capital and operational costs, thereby highlighting the need for strategic deployment. In this workshop, I will introduce a novel methodological framework that integrates geostatistics, a method less explored in transportation engineering, with metaheuristics to optimize the strategic deployment of regional RWIS networks. Using a North American case study, the focus will be on how the proposed method allocates RWIS sensors, inherently considering equity impacts to ensure all areas receive adequate monitoring and fair access to winter maintenance services. The methodologies and findings presented will help mitigate the negative impacts of winter weather on vast transportation systems, benefiting all road users with improved safety and a more environmentally sustainable transportation system.

On Equitable and Sustainable Mobility Systems

This talk discusses the challenges that mobility systems can face due to the presence of self interested users and myopic societal objectives, and presents potential solutions arising from the adoption of accessibility fairness metrics and equitable tolling schemes based on artificial currencies. Specifically, I will first give an overview of our research activities on the operation of intermodal mobility systems, where users can complete a trip using different means of transportation, such as autonomous cars, public transit and active modes. Thereby, I will discuss potential inefficiencies resulting from users selfish behavior, whilst also reflecting on current narratives and paradigms. Second, I will introduce incentive mechanisms to address these inefficiencies with an artificial currency that cannot be bought or traded, but only spent or received when traveling. Assuming the users to be rational, I will demonstrate how such schemes can achieve nearoptimal routing whilst significantly reducing the users perceived discomfort when compared to a centralized optimal allocation that does not consider user urgency.

Equity-Focused Recovery for Urban Traffic Networks

In this talk, we introduce a recovery planning method for urban traffic networks that emphasizes equity, utilizing a data-driven approach. We propose an integrated evaluation index to assess equity in accessibility during hazard recovery, incorporating the variance in accessibility between communities as a penalty term in the overall accessibility measure. By using the improvement of this integrated index as the reward function, the equity-focused recovery control strategy is developed with a reinforcement learning algorithm to prioritize the recovery of affected links. To evaluate the performance of this method, we will present a simulation environment based on the San Francisco Bay Area. Experimental results indicate that, compared to explicit strategies, the proposed recovery strategy maintains a more equitable approach throughout the reconstruction process.

A Fair and Efficient Mechanism for Traffic Congestion Management

Traffic congestion has long been a critical issue in large cities. As the well-known solution, congestion pricing is however arguably unfair as it tends to favor wealthier travelers. To address such an equity issue, we proposed a mechanism named CARMA that makes travelers to bid for access to scarce transport resources with non-tradable mobility credits, in anticipation of other travelers decisions as well as their own future trips. We first demonstrate this idea on a classic transportation model for the morning commute and show CARMA achieves the same system efficiency as first-best pricing meanwhile addressing the fairness issue.

THE ORGANIZERS

Cecilia Pasquale

Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering, University of Genova, Italy.

cecilia.pasquale@unige.it

Alberto Petrillo

Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Napoli Federico II, Italy.

alberto.petrillo@unina.it

Hadis Saadati Nezhad

Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada.

saadatin@ualberta.ca

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