The U.S. Department of Transportation has selected a research consortium led by the New York University Tandon School of Engineering to become the first Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC) in New York City, charged with taking on some of the most pressing mobility challenges facing urban areas of all sizes.
The consortium proposal, led by Kaan Ozbay, a professor in the NYU Tandon Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, won the UTC designation from among 212 applicants to the Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act competition. The research and education center will receive a five-year, $7 million U.S. Department of Transportation grant that will be supplemented with matching funds that will bring its budget to $10.5 million for the five years.
The University of Washington at Seattle, University of Texas El Paso, Rutgers University, and City University of New York will join NYU to use their home cities as living laboratories in which to study challenging transportation problems and field-test novel solutions in close collaboration with transportation users, government agencies, policy makers, private companies, and entrepreneurs.
The new center, which is called Connected Cities for Smart Mobility toward Accessible and Resilient Transportation (C2SMART), aims to accelerate transportation opportunities arising from unprecedented recent advances in communication and smart technologies. University researchers will work with public and private partners in New York City; Seattle; New Brunswick, New Jersey; and El Paso, Texas.
“We are excited to announce this vital urban research initiative – an example of other major research centers that NYU Tandon will be launching in Downtown Brooklyn,” said Dean Katepalli R. Sreenivasan. “As one of the great cities of the world, New York provides an ideal laboratory to develop research that can help transportation decision-makers create better lives for citizens. We are confident that this center will provide major impetus to advancing several forms of transportation technologies and to positively impacting the lives of nearly every person in cities of various sizes around the United States.”
C2SMART brings together a respected group of academics with specialized transportation expertise from across the country, said Ozbay. “Rather than just focusing on developing technologies that make a city smarter, we are dedicated to the critical step of connecting disparate technologies for cities of different populations, infrastructure scales, and systems,” he concluded.
Edited by
Alicia Young