I had a great discussion with Jayson Luber from Denver’s ABC 7 news on his podcast ‘Driving You Crazy!’. We talked about what traffic in a post-Covid world will look like, based on our research in ‘The Rebound’.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, or PodBean.

I recently co-authored an analysis article with Yue Hu and Prof. Dan Work on how vehicle travel times could increase if transit riders switch modes and drive instead, due to Covid-19 concerns. The analysis used data from the American Community Survey across all major US metro areas and showed large susceptibility in transit-heavy cities – modest mode switch from transit to personal vehicles could increase all road users’ travel times by 5-10 minutes each way.

While very small travel time increases (e.g., less than 5 minutes one-way) may not seem concerning, this could equate to hundreds of thousands of additional hours spent in traffic each day and unnecessary emissions and pollution. It certainly highlights the importance of transit in major cities to keep vehicle volumes at manageable levels.

Read the article here on Medium.

I am honored to be chosen as the Top Doctoral Fellow by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program. This was my fourth consecutive year being awarded the fellowship from FHWA and a very nice surprise to take home the Top Doctoral Fellow award on my final year of eligibility.

Almost as nice as the award was the opportunity to deliver the first presentation at the doctoral research showcase at the Tranpsortation Research Board Annual Meeting. I spoke about our variety of micromobility work at Vanderbilt.

Image credit: FHWA/USDOT Photography

In a follow-on from my summer class at Vanderbilt Summer Academy, I joined the Programs for Talented Youth (PTY) for a one-day version of my course Sensors and Big Data Analysis in the Weekend at Vanderbilt University (WAVU) program. The course covered electrical engineering of sensor prototypes, data collection and analysis, and microcontroller programming.

At a middle school STEM day hosted by Vanderbilt student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers, I had the opportunity to conduct a hands-on activity focused on bike infrastructure planning with over 100 students from Metro Nashville Public Schools. Students pretended to be urban planners with the challenging task of multimodal infrastructure planning with limited resources.

The event was covered by the Vanderbilt School of Engineering in a recent article.