It is evident that congestion limits the mobility of people while imposing significant direct and indirect costs on society. In the last decade, we have seen new micro-mobility modes, shared transportation services, connected, autonomous, and electric vehicles take off, while new travel demand in terms of last mile deliveries and changing home-to-work trip patterns have emerged. These have resulted in major benefits but have come at a cost, especially to already underserved communities.

Connected Communities for Smart Mobility towards Accessible and Resilient Transportation for Equitably Reducing Congestion (C2SMARTER), a USDOT Tier 1 University Transportation Center, uses cities as living laboratories to study challenging transportation problems and find solutions from the unprecedented recent advances in communication and smart technologies.

C2SMARTER’s goal is to solve two key problems related to urban congestion: (1) untangling the broad system-of-systems interdependencies facing congested urban systems that not only include multiple modes, but many interrelated sectors, and (2) understanding the system-wide impacts of congestion, in particular those that exacerbate inequities on different population segments. To do this, we will:

Develop new technologies, operational policies, and strategies towards ensuring system-level congestion reduction for all users. 

Build on top of the foundational creation, calibration, and validation of our unique network of testbeds, both physical and cyber, to validate and synthesize insights across cities, and focus on transitioning research into practice for positive, equitable, impacts.

Follow the principles of the USDOT strategic goal of transformation, heavily relying on experimentation, with the goal of using evidence-based decision making to turn research into transformative and equitable solutions that take advantage of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) and connected and automated vehicles.