Transforming Transportation
We are in the midst of a transformational endeavor to decarbonize our transportation system. This transformation represents an opportunity to build a new system that isn’t just more sustainable, but also more equitable and more accessible. It’s crucial that we don’t squander this opportunity to move towards a better future. And that in the process of rebuilding, we avoid reinforcing the issues that underlie the old system.
Making this happen requires participation from institutions and governments at all levels and a strong commitment to the values of equity and accessibility. The reflections included below demonstrate how the members of the CLP Sustainable Transportation Cluster have embraced this opportunity and these values in our work at Harvard and beyond.
Campus Bus Stop on John F. Kennedy Street. Source: Lucas Peilert
Infrastructure Conflicts in Age-Friendly Work.
By Melissa Berlin
We know two things about the middle of the 21st century: the world will be warmer, and the people will be older.
My work in aging began with a research study in suburban southeastern Michigan where I questioned how older adults become invisible in the mainstream social environment. (3) I examined this question through the topic of housing. I interviewed older women who lived alone in private homes or in assisted living facilities. There were major differences between the two groups in how and how often they engaged outside their homes. Yet, those who still drove were remarkably similar between the groups. Social participation in their car-dependent geography largely hinged on the coveted driver’s license. Without the ability to drive, movement outside the home became an extremely restricted, intensely planned endeavor subject to social and financial capital to get a ride. The reliance on others’ availability for informal favors and the restrictive scheduling and waiting for formal ride services cut off all sense of spontaneity.
I later became a transportation nerd, independent of that work – the type of person obsessed with bike lanes and transit as a sustainability solution and livability haven. The Netherlands is something of an oasis for transportation nerds like me. Especially in cities outside of fast-paced Amsterdam, the delegation of street space is incredibly ordered. It prioritizes the movement of people rather than vehicles. I planned a ten-day trip around the country in August 2022 to experience the utopic bike infrastructure. What I did not expect to see was the answer to my long-ago research study. Older adults were everywhere. They were out and about, moving around autonomously. They traveled on bikes, mobility scooters, duofietsen (a side-by-side tandem that only requires one operator), and hybrid wheelchair bikes.
I think of Dutch bike infrastructure as the curb-cut effect at a mega scale. Curb cuts are the concrete ramps that connect the sidewalk to street level. They were widely installed after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in the 1990s to allow wheelchair users to more easily navigate streets and sidewalks. They also unexpectedly made life much easier for pedestrians maneuvering strollers, suitcases, and even bikes. (4) The curb cut effect describes when an intervention is introduced to solve one problem (wheelchair users moving from sidewalk to street level) and inadvertently solves other problems (maneuvering all other wheeled devices).
The Netherlands was trending toward car-dependent infrastructure after the Second World War with most of the Western world. The 1970s saw rise to a series of protests over child fatalities, emissions, and the governmental and individual financial burden of car-centric infrastructure. The country responded by completely overhauling its transportation infrastructure. The new approach institutionalized bike and pedestrian-centric policies. (5) In systematically redesigning streets for bikes, the streets also welcomed all the other mobility devices I noticed, and therefore the easy movement of people with a broad range of abilities. Thus, the loss of a driver's license in old age seems a relatively undisruptive incident in at least Dutch cities. In fact, it is quite burdensome to acquire one in the first place. I theorize that there is not a comparable bludgeon to an individual’s autonomy and spontaneity as I witnessed in my research, but rather a gradual shift toward more assistive forms of mobility. Perhaps riding a manual bike becomes too taxing, but there are still electric bikes, mobility scooters, and so on to meet the mover at their ability. The Netherlands creates an easy environment to navigate from each of those seats.
Back in the United States, I faced an unexpected dilemma in my work. Immediately before starting the urban planning program at Harvard, I worked at the City of Boston implementing the Age Friendly Initiative. The Age Friendly Initiative harmonizes city efforts with the needs of older adults in eight different domains; communication and information, respect and social inclusion, social participation, civic engagement and employment, community support and health services, outdoor spaces and buildings, housing, and transportation.
As a bike, public transit, and age-friendly advocate, my identities conflicted in my work. In the Boston region, our transportation networks are less like a curb-cut effect and more like a curb effect – regardless of which mode you choose, you will hit a curb! The bike lane ends and the rider needs to hop on the sidewalk, which endangers pedestrians, especially those with age-related disabilities such as hearing and vision impairment or slower reaction time. The Ride (an MBTA service for riders with disabilities) cannot drop a passenger off at the curb because of the bike lane. The T can get a passenger who uses a wheelchair to their destination, but the station does not necessarily have an elevator.
We cannot consider ourselves an age-friendly region until older adults are emancipated from mobility dependence. That means the freedom to choose the mode that best suits their needs and to get door to door on that mode. I believe transposing the Dutch bike network in its entirety to the Boston region would open doors to a micro-mobility revolution that is inherently age-friendly, complete with electric methods to overcome our hills. In the meantime, every section of sidewalk and street is a battleground for user priority. In age-friendly work, passenger dropoff and parking tend to be prioritized. Bike advocates fight for every inch of protected bike lane they can get.
The transition to my transportation utopia is incremental and disjointed. In the meantime, I struggle with the value question of how to dedicate space for mobility; to the movement today of older adults in the mode that best fits their needs, or the movement toward our known future in the middle of the 21st century; a warmer planet home to more people than ever living longer than ever, where I am the older adult clinging to the autonomy and spontaneity of free mobility.
D.C. Metro. Source: Daniela Shuman
CLP Cluster logo generated by Fotor AI.
Harvard’s Sustainable Transportation Opportunity
By Lucas Peilert
Achieving the sustainable transportation future we desperately need will require action at every level: international, national, state, local, and even institutional (e.g., your school/workplace). Over the past year, I’ve been working to find ways for Harvard to provide better sustainable transportation options for students and staff.
It started last January -- I was waiting for the Silver Line at Logan Airport, and I began to wonder why Harvard, perhaps in partnership with MIT, doesn’t provide a shuttle to transport the tens of thousands of students returning to campus via the airport at the beginning and end of each semester. Student’s current options aren’t great - it takes almost a full hour to get between Harvard Square and Logan via bus and subway, and rideshare can cost upwards of $30. On top of the cost, rideshare is one of the worst options from a sustainability perspective (1) -- it can generate as many as 5x more emissions as compared to transit.
I decided to check if MIT had an airport shuttle option for the beginning and end of the semester. Sure enough, MIT offers students exactly such a shuttle. I checked MIT’s other transportation benefits -- their employee and staff MBTA, Bluebike, and bike commuter benefits -- they were more generous than Harvard’s across the board. I learned that this strong set of options was a deliberate element of MIT’s climate strategy. (2)
Harvard, on the other hand, has conceived of their climate strategy in much narrower terms. In failing to step up to the plate and recognize sustainable transportation as an opportunity for climate leadership, Harvard is letting down not just students and employees, but also neighbors in the community, who are subject to the negative consequences of poor transportation policy: congested roads, dirtier air, and higher housing prices. Making it easier for students to take public transit, bike, and shuttle transportation would take cars off the road and expand the geographic area in which students could live and still easily access campus.
And so I’ve spent the past year talking to as many people as I can to learn how we can push Harvard to do a better job. With a team of other students from the Graduate School Design (Michael Whelan and Steven Li) and Harvard College (Clyve Lawrence), we recognized data as a big gap: we need to bring administrators information on the mobility challenges students face today and the potential benefits of improving sustainable transportation options. We developed the Harvard Student Transportation Survey to gather this data, and are in the middle of the data collection period.
So far, the response has been overwhelming. Over 2,000 students from all 13 Harvard schools have participated, sharing powerful stories about the struggles they face and innovative ideas about how to bring better transportation options to Harvard. Over the next month, our team plans to use these insights as the basis for a white paper that will lay out a roadmap for Harvard to step up to the plate and make sustainable transportation a pillar of their climate strategy.
Transportation modalities in the Netherlands. Source: Melissa Berlin
Exploring Non-Work Travel Behaviors in the D.C. Public Transportation System
By Daniela Shuman
The travel behavior of non-commute trips is chronically under-studied in the United States, even though commute trips make up less than 20% of total trips. Even the National Household Travel Survey – the main, U.S. wide, Bureau of Transportation commissioned survey – does not disaggregate work trips from non-work trips in their statistical reporting. This results in an awkward figure with more than 70% of the pie representing only one very broad category (non-work trips).
The direct result of the hegemony of work-travel pattern planning in the States is that many travel needs of Americans get underserved. Some types of non-work travel include traveling for the purpose of dropping off children at school, attending household administrative appointments, going to a religious activity, grocery shopping, meeting friends, etc. The international community has explored planning for these types of travel behaviors through the framework of Mobility of Care. Mobility of Care is an umbrella concept for any travel that is for the household. Mobility of Care is more likely to occur in the middle of the day and less likely to be traveling into the central district of cities than commute trips.
Transit agencies across the country, however, have been designed to get people from outside of the city into the central district (i.e a radial subway design, with spokes concentrating in the center) and around “peak” hours. What this means is that people traveling for the purpose of the household have significantly less convenient public transportation experiences than people traveling for the purpose of work. People that perform Mobility of Care are more likely to spend more time on public transportation, less likely to have a direct route (trip-chain), and actually more likely to travel shorter distances. The commuter-centric design has resulted in the majority of travelers being underserved.
Recognizing the imperative to design our transportation systems to better serve the needs of Americans, I sought to explore non-work travel patterns further. I spent the last few years working at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), or the D.C. area public transportation agency as a member of the MIT Mobility Lab. As a student researcher, I was responsible for exploring the travel behaviors of caretakers, or people performing “Mobility of Care” in D.C.
I found two interesting things: 1) Most studies on Mobility of Care relied on survey data, but by using name-based gender inference and tap-in / tap-out data from the WMATA system, we were able to identify Mobility of Care trips at a significantly more granular level. What this means is that while many Mobility of Care related policies were relying on thousands of respondents from surveys, we were able to identify millions of Mobility of Care trips using this big data methodology. 2) While we can adjust service to better serve these travel behaviors, sometimes it is just more inconvenient to take public transportation if you are pushing a stroller around. Policies that make it materially easier for people traveling for Mobility of Care purposes is key to better serving these travelers. Working directly with a team from WMATA, we were able to pass the open stroller policy so people traveling with strollers do not have to close them as they enter the bus, a major inconvenience for many caretakers.
There’s a lot more work to be done to get D.C.’s transportation system to better serve the needs of its residents like research on which routes have the growing target demographic or how to optimize resources in neighborhoods with high non-commute travel. But for now, this is at least a step in the right direction.