Sustainability

Do Incentives Make a Difference? Understanding Smart Charging Program Adoption for Electric Vehicles

Wong, Steven D.
Shaheen, Susan A.
Martin, Elliot PhD
Uyeki, Robert
2023

Climate change and environmental problems have spurred new strategies to reduce fossil fuel consumption in transportation. Two important strategies include a rapid transition to green energy and the replacement of internal combustion vehicles with electric vehicles (EVs). However, the increasing demand for electricity by EVs, especially from time-dependent green sources of energy (e.g., solar, wind), will likely overload the grid at peak hours. Rather than build costly infrastructure improvements for distribution and generation, smart charging programs for EVs could defer charging to off-...

Bikesharing in Europe, the Americas, and Asia: Past, Present and Future

Shaheen, Susan A.
Guzman, Stacey
Zhang, Hua
2010

Growing concerns over global motorization and climate change have led to increasing interest in sustainable transportation alternatives, such as bikesharing (the shared use of a bicycle fleet). Since 1965, bikesharing has grown across the globe on four continents including: Europe, North America, South America, and Asia (including Australia). Today, there are approximately 100 bikesharing programs operating in an estimated 125 cities around the world with over 139,300 bicycles. Bikesharing’s evolution is categorized into three generations: 1) White Bikes (or Free Bike Systems); 2) Coin-...

Reducing Greenhouse Emissions and Fuel Consumption: Sustainable Approaches for Surface Transportation

Shaheen, Susan A.
Lipman, Timothy E.
2007

Climate change is rapidly becoming known as a tangible issue that must be addressed to avoid major environmental consequences in the future. Recent change in public opinion has been caused by the physical signs of climate change–melting glaciers, rising sea levels, more severe storm and drought events, and hotter average global temperatures annually. Transportation is a major contributor of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, accounting for approximately 14 percent of total anthropogenic emissions globally and about 27 percent in the U.S.Fortunately...

Demand for Carsharing Systems in Beijing, China: An Exploratory Study

Shaheen, Susan A.
Martin, Elliot
2010

Rising auto ownership in China brings significant urban and environmental challenges. Since China is still in the early stages of motorization, there are opportunities to introduce alternatives to personal vehicle ownership. The authors conducted a survey with 800 Beijing residents, collecting data on transportation patterns, automobile ownership, environmental attitudes, and carsharing response. Fifteen of those participants were selected to complete an in-depth questionnaire discussing how they would use carsharing services. This paper assesses the potential for carsharing systems within...

Shared Ride Services in North America: Definitions, Impacts, and the Future of Pooling

Shaheen, Susan
Cohen, Adam
2018

Shared ride services allow riders to share a ride to a common destination. They include ridesharing (carpooling and vanpooling); ridesplitting (a pooled version of ridesourcing/transportation network companies); taxi sharing; and microtransit. In recent years, growth of Internet-enabled wireless technologies, global satellite systems, and cloud computing - coupled with data sharing – are causing people to increase their use of mobile applications to share a ride. Some shared ride services, such as carpooling and vanpooling, can provide transportation, infrastructure, environmental...

A Revealed Preference Methodology to Evaluate Regret Minimization with Challenging Choice Sets: A Wildfire Evacuation Case Study

Wong, Steven D.
Chorus, Caspar G.
Shaheen, Susan A.
Walker, Joan L.
2020

Regret is often experienced for difficult, important, and accountable choices. Consequently, we hypothesize that random regret minimization (RRM) may better describe evacuation behavior than traditional random utility maximization (RUM). However, in many travel related contexts, such as evacuation departure timing, specifying choice sets can be challenging due to unknown attribute levels and near-endless alternatives, for example. This has implications especially for estimating RRM models, which calculates attribute-level regret via pairwise comparison of attributes across all alternatives...

North American Carsharing: A Ten Year Retrospective

Shaheen, Susan A.
Cohen, Adam P.
Chung, Melissa S.
2009

Carsharing organizations (or short-term auto use) provide members access to a fleet of shared vehicles on an hourly basis, reducing the need for private vehicle ownership. This paper reflects a ten-year retrospective of carsharing in Canada and the United States (U.S.), including resultsfrom a 2008 operator survey. Since 1994, a total of 50 carsharing programs have been deployed in North America33 are operational, and 17 are defunct. As of July 1, 2008, there were 14 active programs in Canada and 19 in the U.S., with approximately 319,000 carsharing memberssharing over 7,500 vehicles in...

Dynamics in Behavioral Response to Fuel-Cell Vehicle Fleet and Hydrogen Fueling Infrastructure

Shaheen, Susan
Martin, Elliot
Lipman, Timothy E.
2008

Transportation is a major contributor of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. It accounts for approximately 14% of total anthropogenic emissions globally and about 27% in the United States. Growing concern regarding the impacts of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions has led to innovations in automotive and fueltechnology. However, behavioral response to the newest transportation technologies, such as hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) and fueling infrastructure, is not well understood. This paper examines the results of an exploratory F-Cell...

Energy Efficiency - Innovations: Driving Prosperity, Slashing Emissions

Shaheen, Susan
Cohen, Adam
2020

In recent years, mobility on demand (MOD) is gaining popularity among mobility consumers. This innovative concept is based on the principle that transportation is a commodity where modes have economic values that are distinguishable in terms of cost, journey time, wait time, number of con-nections, convenience, and other attributes. MOD enables consumers to access mobility, goods and services on demand by dispatching or using shared mobility, ...

Planning for Shared Mobility

Cohen, Adam
Shaheen, Susan
2018

In recent years, economic, environmental, and social forces have quickly given rise to the “sharing economy,” a collective of entrepreneurs and consumers leveraging technology to share resources, save money, and generate capital. Homesharing services, such as Airbnb, and peer-to-peer carsharing services, such as Getaround, have become part of a sociodemographic trend that has pushed the sharing economy from the fringe and more to the mainstream. The role of shared mobility in the broader landscape of urban mobility has become a frequent topic of discussion. Major shared transportation...