PI
Giovanni Circella
Contact email
gcircella@ucdavis.edu
Team
Lew Fulton, Yunshi Wang, Rosa Dominguez-Faus, Yan Xing, Alimurtaza Kothawala, Maha Ahmed, Sadanand Wachche, Kailai Wang
Acknowledgments
This report was prepared for a project funded by the Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo) of the BMW Group. This study capitalizes on the work developed in several previous research projects carried out at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies and the contribution from the experts that participated in an online survey and attended the online workshops in Fall 2020, listed in Appendix B. The research team would like to thank James Giller and Tak Marcus Chan for their contributions to the research
Description
The way we travel – the places we go, the modes we use (including the energy that fuel these modes), and the way we access transportation services – is changing rapidly. This change will continue to amplify in the next ten years as climate change accelerates, electric vehicles become mainstream, and the need for cleaner, greener transportation assumes greater urgency. These changes are anything but linear. They cannot be extrapolated from current or past trends. Therefore, when thinking about transportation futures, often scenarios that integrate multiple combinations of the future are developed. In this study, we used a two-step process to create such scenarios for the US passenger transportation market in 2030. We first consulted a wide variety of experts from the transportation and energy sectors, to share and converge upon future projections for twenty main indicators that can impact the future of transportation in the US. Using these insights, the research team then developed three distinct scenarios that capture a wide gamut of future possibilities. The first scenario, Hop & Drive, points to a dismal picture – a slower economy, greater suburban growth, and higher driving levels. The second scenario, Mapped by Directives, paints a future shaped by ambitious policies at the local and federal level accelerating electrification, recovering US mass transit systems, and lowering driving levels. The last scenario, Tech Dazzles, imagines what rapid technology improvements and adoption can lead to – an increasingly automated world, and a Mobility as a Service paradigm starting to realize. For each scenario, we estimated VMT, carbon emissions, and electrification levels using International Energy Agency’s mobility model to discuss the implications associated with that transportation future.
Resources