Researchers in the US have set themselves something of a challenge: to change that way that the world moves.
The Precourt Institute for Energy at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability has launched the Sustainable Mobility Center to fundamentally rethink how people and goods move across land, sea, and air – systems that mostly operate as they did decades ago. The new centre aims to make mobility systems more sustainable in the broad sense of the word: environmentally responsible, affordable, reliable, safe, and fair, with solutions that can scale worldwide.
“Transportation is the backbone of the global economy, but also one of its most difficult sectors to transform,” said Marco Pavone, faculty co-director of the Sustainable Mobility Center with Ram Rajagopal told the Stanford Report. “The center is designed to combine Stanford’s strengths – from energy systems to AI and autonomy – with industry and government collaboration to accelerate real-world solutions at scale.”
An example of overlapping challenges is that while electric vehicles do not produce local pollution, most are charged by electric grids that rely on fossil fuel power plants that pollute neighboring communities and drive climate change. Relatedly, how will growing adoption of EVs affect the stability of electricity grids? More broadly, how will public and private transportation of people, as well as the movement of goods over land, air, and sea, work together to improve efficiency, speed, cost, and other goals?
“We are not simply transitioning from one energy source to another,” said Rajagopal, associate professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering, a joint department of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the School of Engineering. “We are rethinking how mobility systems are designed, optimized, and experienced by leveraging new transportation technologies and advances in AI, autonomy, digital infrastructure, smart grids, and data-driven decision-making.”
The Sustainable Mobility Center’s activities will be funded by corporations through two mechanisms: member fees paid to an industrial affiliates program and research sponsored by individual companies. Membership fees are pooled to fund the new center’s research, educational, and other efforts.
Twenty Stanford faculty members across five schools have affiliated themselves with the centre.
(Picture: Andriy Biletskyi)
