Leveraging Urban Mobility Disruptions to Create Better Cities

Over the next 8 sessions we will explore a wide variety of topics that relate to recently emerged new mobility systems and learn how new mobility can be leveraged to increase equity, health, and improve accessibility. The course material is designed to have a global impact by taking advantage of an established network of academic partners, each bringing relevant expertise and representing distinct empirical settings. The international nature of this course will allow you to gain multiple social perspectives and familiarity with transportation challenges and solutions from different parts of the world. Specifically, we bring together professors who teach transportation in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the USA. Our team, lead by professors Chris Zegras (MIT), Jinhua Zhao (MIT) and Carlos Pardo (NUMO), includes one of the world’s preeminent mobility social entrepreneurs (Robin Chase), as well as interviews with entrepreneurs and city planners from across the globe. Brought together, this course provides insight to understand the urban mobility challenges and opportunities from all angles. The course team partnered with the non-governmental global transportation alliance (NUMO) dedicated to understanding how the emerging “new mobility” paradigm can be effectively leveraged to create better and more equitable cities. Among other topics, we will discuss land use and urban form, new mobility and start-up business models, pricing, policy, technology, and data. And, through the exploration of behavioral economics - you will gain knowledge about how human psychology can be used to change travel behavior. Ten Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities will serve as a roadmap in exploration and mitigation of challenges that many cities are currently facing. This course is recommended to anyone who is currently in the field of transportation or urban planning (professionals and government officials) or wants to learn more as well as for students who are interested in this topic. The course team includes: Chris Zegras, Ph.D., MIT Robin Chase, M.S. (MIT), NUMO/Zipcar co-founder and former CEO Natalia Barbour, Ph.D., MIT Jinhua Zhao, Ph.D., MIT Carlos Pardo, M.A.,(LSE), NUMO Francisco Pereira, Ph.D., Technical University of Denmark Carlos Azevedo, Ph.D., Technical University of Denmark Lynette Cheah, Ph.D., Singapore University of Technology and Design Christo Venter, Ph.D., University of Pretoria (South Africa) Ricardo Giesen, Ph.D., Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile Andrew Salzberg, MUP (Harvard), LOEB Fellow at Harvard University, Former Head of Transportation Policy at Uber Guest interviews: Yolisa Mashilwane (Uber, South Africa), Ben Plowden (Transport for London), Onesimo Flores (Jetty co-founder), Oscar Diaz (former mayor's advisor - Bogota), Angie Palacios (Development Bank of Latin America), Marina Moscoso (Despacio), Andrei Greenawalt (Via), Evan Gastman (Uber), Assaf Biderman (Superpedestrian), Harriet Tregoning (NUMO)