Understanding the Next Revolution in Transportation: DOE Publishes Results from 3 year SMART Mobility Consortium Effort
Mobility connects people to opportunity. Whether they are accessing work, healthcare, shopping, education, or leisure activities, people rely on transportation as fundamental to a high quality of life.
Yet for the average American household, transportation costs are second only to housing expenses. Nationally, transportation represents 1/3 of total energy use, and it is a major source of emissions. These factors, combined with new technologies and business models, are rapidly changing the reality of transportation, both for the movement of people and goods. Advanced mobility solutions – from new vehicle powertrains and control systems, to traffic signal control networks in urban areas, to new ride hailing services – have emerged to help people connect more efficiently and affordably to their places of employment and the goods and services they seek. But, how these myriad new technology options interact with and impact transportation at the system level is yet to be fully understood.
What energy implications and opportunities to improve mobility are inherent in these new solutions? Do gains in one area cause trade-offs in another? Where are there synergies between new technologies? The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Systems and Modeling for Accelerated Research in Transportation (SMART) Mobility Consortium is dedicated to answering those kinds of important questions.
The SMART Mobility Capstone reports summarize the consortium’s research methods, results, and insights for the following research pillars. This three year effort has shown that the net impact from different technologies are not always as expected and can often be surprising. This research informs where additional R&D and system level understanding is needed.
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