Transportation

“We want to see, in the next five years or so, the amount of time you need to search for parking spot in a city drop from around 35 to 40 minutes, to less than five minutes,” says Smarking co-founder Wen Sang PhD ’14.

Optimizing parking in the busiest places

Data-analytics platform helps parking managers meet driver demand in high-traffic areas.

October 12, 2016

Cambridge Mobile Telematics co-founders Hari Balakrishnan (left) and Samuel Madden (right).

Rewarding Boston’s safest driver

Mayor Martin Walsh announces a competition aimed at improving Boston driving with an app developed by an MIT spinout.

October 5, 2016

Geoffrey Supran PhD ’16 says “there are a lot of myths floating around about hybrid and electric cars,” for example concerning the manufacture of those vehicles, or their reliance on conventional electricity sources. This often leads people to claim that “they’re no better than your average gasoline vehicle. Our study shows that’s just not true.”

Study: Low-emissions vehicles are less expensive overall

Detailed look at 125 U.S. auto models finds those emitting less carbon are the least expensive to drive.

September 27, 2016

ROBOAT, a new collaboration between researchers from MIT and partner institutions in the Netherlands, seeks to design and deploy a fleet of autonomous boats on the canals of Amsterdam.

An autonomous fleet for Amsterdam

MIT, AMS Institute will collaborate to solve complex urban problems for Amsterdam with the development of autonomous "roboats."

September 19, 2016

MIT junior Wally Wibowo (left) and graduate student Justin Miller prepare an electric vehicle for the Aerospace Controls Lab mobility-on-demand research.

On-demand mobility experiment coming to MIT

Electric shuttles will whisk volunteers about campus while gathering data for on-demand transportation services.

September 8, 2016

A study led by MIT researchers suggests that using mobile-phone data to track people’s movement provides a deeper picture of exposure to pollution in urban settings, compared to only studying air-quality levels in fixed places.

Measuring exposure to pollution

Mobile-phone data helps researchers study an urban problem in greater detail.

September 1, 2016

Researchers from MIT and Ford Motor have developed a new computational system that uses cellphone location data to infer urban mobility patterns.

Inferring urban travel patterns from cellphone data

Big-data analysis could give city planners timelier, more accurate alternatives to commuter surveys.

August 29, 2016

Nighttime image of New York City, with the red showing a large population density. “The adoption potential of electric vehicles is remarkably similar across cities, from dense urban areas like New York, to sprawling cities like Houston. This goes against the view that electric vehicles — at least affordable ones, which have limited range — only really work in dense urban centers,” says Jes...

Can today’s EVs make a dent in climate change?

Electric vehicles can meet drivers’ needs enough to replace nearly 90 percent of vehicles now on the road.

August 15, 2016

In 2012, a team of students in MIT’s well-known product-design class, Course 2.009, invented a hand truck with fold-out treads and a braking system that made hauling kegs downstairs safer and easier. Now that hand truck, called the Glyde, is being used by hundreds of people worldwide.

Gliding from classroom to market

Treaded hand truck created as class project is now making downstairs deliveries safer.

July 28, 2016

Roughness- and deflection-induced excess carbon dioxide emissions on Virginia’s Interstate Highway network in 2013

Data-driven approach to pavement management lowers greenhouse gas emissions

July 26, 2016

Assessing health impacts of policies and plans

New class offers urban planners tools to explore the intersection of city planning and public health.

July 26, 2016

Left to right: Roland Pellenq of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), Katerina Ioannidou of the MIT Energy Initiative, and Franz-Josef Ulm of CEE have developed a detailed understanding of the nanoscale forces at work as cement hardens — a critical step toward developing stronger, longer-lasting, less carbon-intensive concrete for “greener” construction in the future.

Designing climate-friendly concrete, from the nanoscale up

New understanding of concrete’s properties could increase lifetime of the building material, decrease emissions.

July 21, 2016

“We don’t necessarily want [air traffic controllers] to spend the bandwidth on processing 40 pieces of information. Instead, we can tell them the three top choices,” says Hamsa Balakrishnan, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and a member of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

Ready for takeoff

Hamsa Balakrishnan develops algorithms to reduce airport congestion.

July 15, 2016

Jamal Abdul Nasser Traffic Circle in Amman, Jordan

Improving pavement management in Jordan

Concrete Sustainability Hub researcher Omar Swei is working to help Jordanian planners optimize maintenance on state-owned highways.

July 11, 2016

Xian Village in Guangzhou, China, is a project under redevelopment.

DUSP, CRE, and STL Lab award $1.1 million in second round of faculty research funding

Nine grants awarded to MIT faculty and researchers.