Celebrating International Women's Day in March

Towards Mobility Equity – Women cracking the data code in Transport | 30 Mar 2023

Presentations:

#1. Equity In An Evolving Mobility Paradigm

Presenter: Dr Shamsunnahar Yasmin (Shams), Senior Lecturer/ Senior Research Fellow ‘Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety – Queensland (CARRS-Q)’ and ‘School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’, Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

Equity is increasingly becoming an important goal of a transport policy goal. In the transport domain, equity can be defined as a public policy goal to ensure the proportionality principle within the mobility sector – proportionate access to transport resources (such as affordability and accessibility to transport services) and proportionate share of transport burdens (such as transport externalities). Though the proportionate principle is theoretically attractive, securing equity in the transport sector is extremely difficult fundamentally sourced by resource allocation biases (resulting from limitations in resources) and self-selection biases (resulting from residential location choice by social status/income). However, equity is a prerequisite for a stable, safe, and progressive society.

Earlier studies have recognised the importance of equity in transport but are significantly limited to the context of accessibility (to resources and services) across different communities [Vanoutrive and Cooper, 2019]. But the ideas about equity are context-dependent. For example, to low-income workers relying on active transport, equity might mean safe and connected active transport infrastructure instead of a subsidy for buying an Electric Vehicle (EV) that would serve a user who can afford to buy and maintain an EV. A woman avoiding a shorter route because of the lack of security might feel that equity has been served if she does not have to worry about security. These examples demonstrate that equity is a multi-attribute decision-making problem including multiple agents (individual, stakeholder, road system). The current transport equity analysis considers only a subset of transport equity factors resulting in (unknowing) use of sub-optimal and/or inefficient outcomes. 

The presentation will discuss a research proposal to develop and evaluate a unified transport equity assessment tool to manage and outline potential transition paths to achieving a safe, sustainable, efficient, and equitable transport system.

#2. Long-term spatiotemporal evolution of public transport networks and their passengers

Presenter: Associate Professor Rachel Cardell-Oliver, BSc MSc W.Aust., PhD Camb.
Head of Department, School of Physics, Maths and Computing, Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Western Australia

How do public transport passengers behave over the long term? How much do they churn, drop in and out or commute regularly?

How does the network itself behave in the long term? What are the factors associated with regions of the network with thriving or declining passenger demand?

My research addresses such questions using machine learning techniques and data from ticket logs.

#3. Geo-design in planning and designing for bicycling: an evidence-based approach for collaborative bicycling planning

Presenter: Parisa Zare, Transport Planner, AECOM and PhD Candidate, School of Art, Design, and Architecture, Built Environment Faculty, University of New South Wales, Sydney

In recent times, cities have increasingly promoted bicycling as a mode of transport as part of their strategy to develop a more sustainable transportation system. Australia is one of the countries that seek to promote bicycling in a significant manner. There are two primary barriers faced in this effort. The first is the organizational complexity of planning and of implementing cycling-related projects, which can span across different agencies in government at various levels, from federal to local. Second is the lack of a clear framework for effectively planning a bicycling network using multiple data and tools available to these agencies within a limited budget. This study investigates the use of a geo-design-based, collaborative, and data-driven framework for planning bicycling networks, which brings various stakeholders, such as transport planners, urban designers, and academics, into the planning practice, thus overcoming the mentioned barriers. Geo-design is an environmental design framework for complex problems involving the collaboration of different teams and stakeholders, supported by digital computing and communication technologies. This study aims to develop and test a geo-design framework for planning bicycling networks to examine possible design scenarios and facilitate decision-making processes using various bicycling-related datasets and digital tools, such as the Agent-Based Model.

The presentation will discuss the role of data-driven approaches in providing an equal environment for bicycling for citizens. Using the developed tool enables the simulation of the built environment to examine possible design scenarios for the future of bicycling networks considering the elderly, children, and women’s trip specifications.