Miscellaneous: Mobility as a service (MaaS), Transportation Economics, and More
I have a solid background and persistent interest in general areas of transportation such as Mobility as a service (MaaS), transportation economics, transport geography, traffic simulation, infrastructure design, transportation operations, travel demand management, public transit, etc.
Transportation Economics 💰💰💰⛽⛽⛽
In the University of Maryland, I am the technical leader of the first-in-the-nation MaaS APP “incenTrip” project, funded by USDOE and USDOT, to provide green travel options and personalized incentives for real-world travelers. As a smartphone incentive-based travel demand management application, IncenTrip acts as a one-stop trip planner, information provider, and incentive allocator, accommodating real-time information for various travel modes such as driving, ridesharing, transit, walking, biking, and multimodal options.
A major threat to the growing usage of shared-cars is customer churn. When I was an intern in the China biggest carsharing program, I examined how personalized economic incentives influence customer churn by longitudinally analyzing over 4 million coupons.
Shared Mobility 👫👫👫🚇🚇🚇
Heavy rain can induce road flooding especially in the urban areas due to poor drainage systems. Effectively identifying the flooding road segment can help people plan their travel reasonably and reduce losses. Combining social media posts, precipitation, and traffic flow information, we develop an automatic road flooding detection algorithm and deploy it to Shenzhen City, China. Result shows that our algorithm performs satisfactorily with a 68%–90% detection rate and a 1.5%–2% false alarm rate.
Crowdsourced data offer new opportunities to monitor and investigate changes in road traffic flow during extreme weather. We utilize diverse crowdsourced data from mobile devices and the community-driven navigation app, Waze, to examine the impact of three weather events – floods, winter storms, and fog – on road traffic. We find overall winter storms have the greatest impact on road traffic, while at a link level, lower-class roads with lower average speeds and volumes experience milder impact.
