COVID-19’s Effect on Transportation: Developing a Public COVID-19 Data Dashboard

The COVID-19 outbreak has dramatically changed travel behavior in cities across the world. With changed travel demand, economic activity, and social-distancing/stay-at-home policies, transportation systems have experienced an unprecedented shift in demand and usage. Since the start of the pandemic, the C2SMART research team has been collecting data and investigating the impact of COVID-19 on mobility and sociability.

Urban Connector Year 3: Field Tests

Over the past three years, researchers at UTEP and NYU have collaborated on the development of a smartphone application, Urban Connector, which is designed to cater to the urban mobility needs and preferences of seniors in El Paso. A prototype of the application was developed and a follow-up survey was conducted to gather feedback. The app was improved to its beta version, and was tested by seniors in El Paso in their day-to-day travels.

Development of an Open Source Multi-Agent Virtual Simulation Test Bed for Evaluating Emerging Transportation Technologies and Policies

In previous years, the research team has developed and calibrated a base model implemented in MATSim and SUMO. This virtual testbed simulates an 8-million-person population and includes cars, trains, bus, bikeshare, taxi, and other for-hire vehicles calibrated to the year 2016. The team is building the architecture to host this virtual test bed and developing system design and user guide documentation.

Urban Microtransit Cross-sectional Study for Service Portfolio Design

The knowledge base from this data can be used to support design of portfolios of service options for a city. Given all the myriad of different options and existing public data, can we design a framework that can identify operating strategies that dominate in one or more sustainability criteria and quantify their performances within a portfolio of projects for city agencies to evaluate?