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Along with billions of dollars to build roads, bridges and transit lines, the infrastructure law included funding to boost research into the future of the nation’s transportation system.
The University of Maryland was awarded $10 million to launch a new research center, in partnership with teams at four other colleges, that will focus on some of the Biden administration’s top priorities. The Center for Multi-Modal Mobility in Urban, Rural, and Tribal Areas will examine how to build fairer, greener transportation networks, while promoting economic growth.
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The center’s work will look at the possible benefits of fare-free transit; the design of “complete streets” that are safe for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists; and the role of autonomous vehicles in low-income communities. Researchers also will consider ways to improve connections between rural and tribal communities and their closest cities.
The Washington Post spoke to Cinzia Cirillo, director of the Maryland Transportation Institute, and Xianfeng “Terry” Yang, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, about plans for the new center. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Post: The center has a wide-ranging mission. What do you see as being the big unifying theme of this work going forward?
Cinzia Cirillo: The U.S. has been centered on highways and roadways. So most of the money in the last 50 years has been invested in highways, roadways, cars. There has been a consistent lack of investment in public transportation and not a lot of attention to other modes, especially no infrastructure at all for pedestrians and for bikers. That’s the objective of this center. The center is going to look at how it’s better to invest our money in transit, how to make people walk and bike more and how to integrate all these modes in a connected system.
Xianfeng “Terry” Yang: We also want to look at how smart technology can not only benefit urban areas, but also benefit suburban or rural areas. We’re talking about smart technology that often requires a lot of infrastructure investment. But it turns out, especially for those low-income communities, they are not very interested in adopting a lot of infrastructure just to support smart vehicles. So that’s why we’re trying to look at what kind of research we can do to, firstly, leverage existing infrastructure, secondly, explore a low-cost solution that can benefit low-income communities, as well.
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The Post: What’s your assessment of fare-free transit and what are the questions you think need to be answered before states, cities and transit agencies could confidently bank on that as a strategy?
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Cirillo: These projects are very controversial. In Europe, there are no very successful cases of fare-free public transportation. The results in the literature are not overwhelmingly good. In the U.S., we don’t know yet because we are just starting.
The project we have been following, the one in Alexandria, is more than just free-fare public transportation. The transit agency there did a much more comprehensive plan. First of all, they have increased the number of buses. They have made the bus more sustainable because these are electric buses. They are serving underserved communities and they are really giving high-frequency service. So all this is very positive. Fare-free is part of it, but what we need is a vision of having all these policies implemented. Again, the numbers that we are seeing about fare-free are not overwhelmingly good. But this vision, I think it’s the right one.
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The Post: I wanted to shift to the redesign of Baltimore Avenue near your campus and the idea of “complete streets.” Are you seeing this concept spreading outside of downtown areas into suburbs?
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Cirillo: Having streets that look like highways on Baltimore Avenue, it’s not good. We have a lot of college students, we have a lot of apartments and development. We really need these complete streets. I think Baltimore Avenue, they could have done even better because now there is no clear separation between bike and pedestrian, for example.
We want kids to come to College Park without their car. But then at the same time, we want a safe street for them to go to the grocery shops, to Trader Joe’s and Aldi, and we want them to bike to the metro and take the metro and go downtown if they want. That’s the way we should imagine places like College Park in the next 10 to 20 years, and if it proves to be good, other colleges or other places will follow.
Expanding this to suburbs is a challenge. The key is the connection, so you don’t want to have complete streets that end in the middle of nowhere. You want these bike paths to be connected. If you are doing 10 miles with your bike, you want to do this 10 miles on a complete street, on a safe street.
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The Post: How do you see automated vehicle technology developing and what do you see as the implications for transportation equity? How can we make sure that these technologies aren’t reserved to benefiting the rich?
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Yang: The price of the autonomous vehicles would be much higher than the regular cars, at least in the near future. That’s why we’re trying to figure out a way to make autonomous vehicle technology more equitable. Even though we could not have everyone drive an autonomous vehicle, we can find a low-cost solution that can promote connected vehicle technology. So as long as you have a smartphone, you have a mobile app, then your vehicle will become a connected vehicle. Even though you are driving a regular car, your vehicle will be able to kind of follow the autonomous vehicle in traffic.
The second research direction is related to automated shared mobility. In this case, there is a debate on whether or not it is even worth owning your own car. Imagine you own a car, you have to pay for gas, you have to pay registration and the insurance. But if we can have shared mobility with autonomous vehicles, because there are no drivers, the costs can be much lower. It may be for low-income communities, shared mobility would be a better choice because they only pay maybe five bucks per day to commute, and compared with buying a car and maintaining a car, that would be much, much cheaper.
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The Post: Your work is going span urban, rural and tribal communities, and each has different problems and challenges that they face. How are you going to try to tie these different parts of the country together thematically? Do you think there are lessons that can be learned in one kind of community that might apply to other communities?
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Cirillo: There is diversity in this group of scholars. We have people from rural areas — they know the needs, for example, of driving in a very challenging weather condition. The safety of pedestrians in tribal areas — there are statistics that are very scary about the number of people who die due to safety issues in tribal communities. So the idea is to work with them to see if methods and solutions that are adopted in urban areas can be transferred to rural areas: variable speed limits, low speeds and technology.
We are working on workforce development. There was a particular request saying, “they want us to adopt electric vehicles, but we have nobody who can maintain an electric vehicle here so can you arrange for us the training of these kinds of people? Our community college cannot afford to have a professor like the flagship university.” So the idea was to go there and teach classes that connect them and train the next generation of experts in transportation. And these people then hopefully will work locally to solve the problems.
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