TransportLab: Transport Engineering and Planning Research
TransportLab is a new interdisciplinary research group at the University of Sydney. TransportLab aims to find solutions to transport problems independent of domain. Members of the group come from the Faculties of Architecture, Design, and Planning and Engineering. University of Sydney is the top-ranked university in Australia in Transport Science and Technology. Our research themes are: Access, Connect, Control, Design, Rely, Share, Sustain.
Current areas of research interest include:
Traffic Programming: Design of micro-decisions in automated transport.
The emergence of autonomous vehicles has wide-ranging impacts on the transport system. This research develops and designs incentives, auctions and behavioural and pricing rules to manipulate micro traffic dynamics such as lane- changing, merging, energy-efficient driving, and driving at intersections, in roads without defined lanes and shared spaces to achieve collective macro benefits. The project targets mixed traffic where AVs and conventional human-driven vehicles interact and share the road. Our researchers are looking at performance dependencies in the transport system as these technologies mature. [Control, Sustain, Design, Share]
Transport and Land Use Interactions
Transport and land use systems are connected through the concept of accessibility: transport networks provide access to activities. Technological phase changes in transport systems cause shifts of accessibility patterns in cities. With new changes to transport networks, there are winners and losers, and people reshape their transport behaviours in response. Our researchers develop new metrics and theory to measure relative network and spatial efficiency and equity in urban systems. [Access, Connect, Design, Sustain]
Intelligent Safety
- Reducing pedestrian crashes through better intersection design
- Strategic scheduling and deployment of random breath and drug testing operations
Market Design of Point to Point Transport Services
Point to point services (also called ride-hailing and Transport Network Companies (TNC)) such as Uber, Didi, Lyft, and others have explosively emerged all around the world offering e-hailing platforms to help match riders with drivers. It is essential to analyse the externalities of such services to society (such as congestion, pollution, crashes) and design regulations and innovative mechanisms for solo, shared and automated point-to-point transport services in a cooperative-competitive on-demand transport market. [Control, Connect, Design, Share]
Transport System Performance Measures
Increasing availability of data and a refocusing on the customer have led to new approaches to transport system performance measurement. Our researchers leverage new data sources and econometric approaches to benchmark status quo performance and model interventions. [Access, Connect, Rely, Sustain]. Key projects include:
- Integrated performance measures for a multimodal transport system
- Tools for modelling journey-time reliability benefits
- Lags in access to key urban infrastructure
Traffic Operations and Control
Traffic operations are essential for managing congestion and supporting economic productivity. Building on control theory, traffic flow theory and empirical approaches, our researchers contribute to theoretical and practical traffic operations. [Control, Rely, Share]