In an article for The Boston Globe, Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, explores how to develop transportation strategies for elders. “When considering the possibilities for elder transportation, it’s important to keep in mind that the needs of seniors are diverse,” writes Coughlin. “One senior might find one innovation helpful but not another. The answer to such a variety of needs may be to think more broadly about what constitutes travel.”
An electric, autonomous boat developed by MIT researchers is being tested in the canals of Amsterdam as part of an effort to ease traffic, reports Aleksandar Furtula and Mike Corder for the AP. The Roboat project is aimed at developing “new ways of navigating the world’s waterways without a human hand at the wheel,” write Furtula and Corder. “The vessels are modular so they can be easily adapted for different purposes, carrying cargo or workers.”
UPI reporter Brooks Hays writes that a new study by MIT researchers finds that people tend to follow a predictable travel pattern that remains consistent in countries around the world. The findings could help urban planners “better understand how populations interact with their surroundings, as well as assist city planners with zoning, infrastructure and other development decisions,” writes Hays.
Researchers from the MIT Senseable City Lab have uncovered a new travel pattern in human mobility that remains consistent across four continents, reports Beck Ferreira for Motherboard. “The notion that distance and frequency of visitation are related is in accordance with intuition,” the researchers explain. “What is surprising is that the relationship between these two quantities can be described by a simple and clean mathematical law.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, senior lecturer Frederick Salvucci and research scientist James Aloisi underscore the importance of federal investment in infrastructure to help create a more equitable and sustainable transportation network in the future. “A federal infrastructure initiative that becomes more of the same won’t effectively respond to the urgent need to build back better, which means providing states and cities with the funding and programmatic support they need to provide the essential transportation services that make our economy work equitably,” they write.
Lecturer Karilyn Crockett is joining the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce as a research and program consultant, reports Jon Chesto for The Boston Globe. “Crockett will help the chamber and the broader business community address economic and racial inequities and related barriers to opportunity, particularly in the areas of transportation, housing, education, and climate change,” Chesto writes.
Gizmodo reporter Victoria Song writes that a new study by researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) finds that “not only do rideshares increase congestion, but they also made traffic jams longer, led to a significant decline in people taking public transit, and haven’t really impacted car ownership.”
In an article for The Boston Globe, Prof. Rafi Segal and Lecturer Marisa Morán Jahn explore how architecture can play a role in long-term care solutions. “As we rebuild our nation’s care infrastructure in this moment of economic recovery, we need to consider how the design of our cities and homes can enable the active participation of caregivers, elders, and people with disabilities in our democracy,” they write.
A new report by graduate student Ben Walker examining eviction filings in the City of Boston finds that “from Feb. 28, 2020 to Feb. 28, 2021, evictions were filed at more than twice the rate in neighborhoods where a majority of renters are people of color than in neighborhoods where most renters are white,” reports Chris Lisinski for WBUR.
A new study by researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) finds that ride-sharing services can lead to increased congestion, both in intensity and duration, reports E&T. “While mathematical models in prior studies showed that the potential benefit of on-demand shared mobility could be tremendous, our study suggests that translating this potential into actual gains is much more complicated in the real world,” says Prof. Jinhua Zhao.
Lecturer Karilyn Crockett, the first chief of equity for the City of Boston, speaks with Dialynn Dwyer of Boston.com about her efforts aimed at improving equity in Boston. “A lot of what’s been going on has just been working in partnership internally with city departments and agencies, and then looking outside of the building to see — who are these other partners who are really willing to take on this big work of equity?” says Crockett. “It’s been an incredibly busy and productive time because there’s such an incredible appetite, and even hunger, for understanding what equity is … across the city.”
Writing for Bloomberg, Prof. Carlo Ratti and Saskia Sassen of Columbia University explore how to help rebuild cities in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. “We have the duty to recapitalize our cities — not in financial terms, but in terms of their ‘living’ capital, shoring up their human reserves,” they write.
Prof. Amy Glasmeier speaks with Greg Iacuurci of CNBC about the calculator she and her colleagues developed that displays what an actual living wage is in different areas of the country. “People are not surviving on the minimum wage,” says Glasmeier,
Nigerian economist Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81 has been selected to lead the WTO, writes David McHugh for the AP. “Her first priority would be quickly addressing the economic and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as by lifting export restrictions on supplies and vaccines and encouraging the manufacturing of vaccines in more countries,” writes McHugh.
Graduate student Carmelo Ignaccolo speaks with Forbes contributor Rebecca Ann Hughes about his decision to move back to his hometown in Sicily during the Covid-19 pandemic and his work helping a local organization map networks of remote working hubs, as part of an effort to help support the local economy. “It was a nice idea of combining work but also local support for communities which have been left behind, especially in southern Italy,” says Ignaccolo.