About the Mobility COE
Established through a cooperative agreement between the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and UCLA, the Center of Excellence on New Mobility and Automated Vehicles (Mobility COE) researches and disseminates research on the impacts of new mobility and highly automated vehicles on land use, urban design, transportation, real estate, equity, and municipal budgets.
Focus
The Mobility COE collects, funds, and conducts research on how behaviors of emergent new technologies aggregate over time with increased market penetration and geographic scale, including system-level impacts on:
- Land use, real estate, and urban design;
- Transportation system optimization, including:
- System-level efficiencies;
- Travel demand and associated energy use;
- System resilience, security, and reliability;
- Commercial and freight operational models; and
- Mode switching and transfers.
- Equitable access to mobility and job participation; and
- Municipal budgets and cost-effective allocation of public resources.
Approach
The Mobility COE has four major research thrusts, evaluated under the two paradigms of looking at today and tomorrow, and preparing for an unknown future.
Looking at new mobility today and planning for tomorrow describes the part of our work that will: evaluate existing and design/optimize for future transportation system, land use and urban design, equitable access to mobility/job participation, municipal budgets and public resources in which new mobility operates, under current and rational future scenarios; and develop research-informed tools and funding strategies to help public authorities and stakeholders decide how to plan for, design, engineer and fund infrastructure that supports and manages new mobility services and technologies;
Preparing for an unknown future describes the part of our work that will involve the identification of unintended consequences, particularly risks, from new mobility deployment at scale. We will, across disciplines, evaluate both the effects that new mobility could have (negative and positive), and under what circumstances those effects might occur, so as to further inform long-range decisions on new mobility infrastructure, funding, policies, and prevention and mitigation strategies.
Under these paradigms, COE’s distinguished scholars and national experts will focus on four major research thrusts:
Thrust 1: Land Use and Urban Planning
Thrust 2: Systems Analysis and Optimization
Thrust 3: Equitable Use, Access, and Impacts
Thrust 4: Pathway Design and Outreach
