Scenarios planning for major mass transit investments in an era of uncertainty

Monday, September 19: 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Location: Great Hall

 

Yoram Shiftan

Professor, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

The metropolitan area of Tel-Aviv is the largest metropolis in Israel, home to 4.0 million residents and serves as the business and financial core of the country. Mobility is based mostly on private vehicles with low usage of public transport which is based mostly on buses. As a result, the metropolitan is one of the most congested metropolitan areas in the world (21st most congested according to TomTom), and it is also the fastest growing metropolitan area in the developed world (2% annually) forecasted to have a population of 5.4 million by 2040.
In the last years the government has accelerated investments in mass transit, three light rail lines are currently under construction and additional three metro lines are under planning with an estimated investment of 50 billion USD.
This presentation will present a major scenario planning process to evaluate the future of the transportation system and its performance under a wide array of potential changes in an era of uncertainty and evaluate the need and justification for these major investments considering uncertain trends including the impacts of COVID-19 and technology developments.
The first set of scenarios includes various sensitivity analysis of population growth and land use distributions, economic crisis, etc.… as well as the impact of various auxiliary policy measures and specifically congestion pricing. The second set of scenarios includes long term impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on work and telecommute habits as well as other activity and travel patterns. This analysis is based on a panel survey of 2,000 respondents asking their travel habits before and during the pandemic, as well as their intentions regarding their activity and travel habits after the pandemic. Various traffic counts and Google data collected continuously support this analysis. The third set of scenarios discuss the introduction and penetration of autonomous vehicles and Mobility as a Service (MAAS) based on. This analysis is based on various transportation trends from major cities in the word with the introduction of Transportation Network Companies (TNC) as well as other service, and various simulation studies.
This abstract responds mostly to the theme of “Immediate shocks/disruptions to the transportation systems” by analyzing the impacts of COVID-19 on travel and activity patterns, and to the theme of “Long terms and phenomena” by analyzing COVID-19 as well as the impacts of automation and Mobility as a Service.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Yoram Shiftan is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Technion specializing in travel behavior, transport policy, and transport project evaluation. He is the head of the Israeli Center for Smart Transpotation Research and was the editor of Transport Policy and the chair of the International Association of Travel Behavior Research (IATBR). In the last years his research focuses on activity and travel behavior implication of driverless cars and their potential impact on our cities, and he is a member of the management committee and among the leaders of the EU COST Action on the Wider Impact of Autonomous Vehicle (WISE-ACT). He was also a member of the management committee and among the leaders of the EU COST Action Transport Equity Analysis (TEA): assessment and integration of equity criteria in transportation. Professor Shiftan also has vast experience in evaluation and decision-making process of major transportation investments both in Israel and the US, currently consulting the Israel Government on the cost benefit analysis of the Tel-Aviv metro system, an estimate investment of over 40 Billion USD. Prof. Shiftan received his Ph.D. from MIT and since then has published over hundred refereed papers and co-edited five books. Overall, he spent 4.5 years as a visiting professor in leading universities in Europe and the US: George Mason, VA., University of Michigan, Ohio State University, ETH Zurich, University of Illinois, Chicago, and Northwestern, IL.