The course is designed around collaborations focused on specific student deliverables. My intention is to create student “teams” among class members who will collaborate on specific short-term activities that will build on ongoing research and inform the ultimate class output, a response to the Draft Interim CECP, including (1) a meta-analysis of recent surveys of current, former, and potential transit riders, geared toward understanding attitudes toward personal mobility and transit specifically, and how they may have evolved, and (2) a similar analysis of global “best practices” in connection with transit operations designed to ensure public health and rider confidence. This will require review of relevant material (which will be included in the readings) and additional (reasonably modest) research to identify gaps, new material, and insights that combine to synthesize extant research and surveys relevant to the course purpose.
At the conclusion of the class, we hopefully will have fashioned a response to the Draft Interim CECP that takes into account the dual and related issues of “building back better” from COVID-19 (the Sustainability Response) and decreasing the transportation sector’s currently outsized impacts on carbon emissions.
[The above assignment resulted in a rough outline that later formed the basis for a letter Jim Aloisi sent as part of the public comment process on the Draft Interim CECP.]
