Understanding the Role of Microtransit in a Multi-modal Ecosystem
Microtransit, or on-demand shuttles, can have huge benefits to mobility when implemented under the right settings, representing an increasingly large research area. Professor Joseph Chow, Deputy Director of C2SMART, and Research Professor and Co-PI, Rae Zimmerman, were joined by Saar Golde, chief Data Scientist at Via, a microtransit company which partners with different city agencies to implement shared taxi, taxi support software, specialized shuttle bus services, and other first/last mile services. Using Via data from several cities in the U.S., the panel shared insights into the future of microtransit, and how it might be used to aid partnerships with city agencies in an expanding portfolio of microtransit deployments.
Dr. Joseph Chow is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil & Urban Engineering and Deputy Director at the C2SMART University Transportation Center at NYU and heads BUILT@NYU: the Behavioral Urban Informatics, Logistics, and Transport Laboratory. His research expertise lies in transportation systems, with emphasis on multimodal networks, behavioral urban logistics, smart cities, and transport economics. He is an NSF CAREER award recipient; he serves as the elected Vice-Chair of the Urban Transportation SIG at INFORMS Transportation Science & Logistics Society and is an appointed member of the Editorial Boards for Transportation Research Part B and the Committee on Transportation Network Modeling (ADB30) at the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. Prior to NYU, Dr. Chow was the Canada Research Chair in Transportation Systems Engineering at Ryerson University. From 2010 to 2012, he was a Lecturer at the University of Southern California and a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Irvine, where he led the development of a statewide freight forecast model for Caltrans. He has a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from UC Irvine (‘10), and an M.Eng. (‘01) and B.S. (‘00) in Civil Engineering from Cornell University with a minor in Applied Math. Dr. Chow is a former Eisenhower and Eno Fellow and a licensed PE in NY.
Rae Zimmerman is Research Professor and Professor Emerita of Planning and Public Administration at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, after being a full-time professor for many years, and is Director of the School’s Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems (ICIS), initially funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). She is an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow and past president and Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) and recipient of SRA’s 2019 Distinguished Achievement Award and 2015 Outstanding Service Award. Professional appointments include the Transportation Research Board’s critical transportation infrastructure protection committee, co-chairing the physical security subcommittee, the NYC Panel on Climate Change, and the National Academies urban sustainability committee. Her research focus is urban infrastructure interconnectivity, resilience in extreme events, and human behavior influences on services. Books include Transport, the Environment, and Security in addition to almost 200 other publications and reports. Education: B.A. Chemistry, University of California (Berkeley), Master of City Planning, The University of Pennsylvania and Ph.D. Planning, Columbia University.
Saar Golde is the chief data scientist at Via Transportation, a transportation software company focused on shared rides. Previously, Saar built and led the data science practice at information and technology consultancy Knowledgent, was the first analytics solution architect for Revolution Analytics (now part of Microsoft), and served as the chief economist of the virtual world of Gaia Online. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, an MSc in management science from Tel Aviv University, and a BSc in physics and math from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Saar is currently on leave from his adjunct position at the engineering school at NYU, where he usually teaches a class on big data in finance.
