Seminar: Positive Feedback in Transportation Systems

This talk will present tractable models of road traffic and transit which feature positive feedback, whereby my travel choice (e.g., whether to travel, what mode to take, etc.) leads others to make the same choice. Positive feedback amplifies policy impacts and can lead surprising results, such as a toll that raises traffic demand and a road expansion that cuts it. Overall, the talk will demonstrate the insights possible from incorporating economic thinking into detailed engineering models. I will also show my group’s AI chatbot that answers questions about transit systems.

Since 2018, Lewis Lehe has been an assistant professor in the transportation systems group at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the economics and measurement of travel in cities. He holds an MA in Transport Economics of University of Leeds, and MS and PhD degrees in civil engineering from UC Berkeley. He serves on TRB’s Economics and Finance Committee, as the Treasurer of Findings Press and as Communications Officer of the International Transportation Economics Association.