Welcome to the Transit Mobility Lab at Northeastern University

With increased urbanization, providing for mobility is an issue that cities around the world are struggling to deal with. Transit is becoming an increasingly important means of addressing urban mobility issues. Professors Koutsopoulos, from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Northeastern University, and Zhao and Wilson from the MIT Transit Lab and the MIT Urban Mobility Lab have formed the Transit Mobility Lab in order to promote innovation in public transportation.

The initiative, building on the long history of MIT’s Transit Program, aims at promoting innovation in the day-to day practice of transit agencies around the world, and developing strategic directions and priorities based on identified opportunities.  Transit data analytics, taking advantage of the vast databases that are becoming available at many transit agencies, is at the core of the research activities.

A number of transit agencies are industry partners in the program.  CTA (Chicago), MBTA (Boston), and WMATA (Washington DC) are currently sponsoring research activities in a number of areas of mutual interest. These global partnerships are the centerpiece of this collaborative applied research program, and facilitate a highly effective two-way educational process and knowledge transfer. A critical aspect of the program, that plays an important role in technology transfer, is that participating graduate students spend several weeks per year as interns at the sponsor’s location working closely with the key agency staff. The approach exemplifies experiential philosophy of learning.  The program also promotes propagation of best practice among agencies, promoting cross-fertilization of ideas, methods, and experiences, and, consequently, improving the agency’s intellectual capital.