On October 29-30 the MIT Transit Group hosted its sixth Transit Leaders Roundtable. The two-day event ­— co-sponsored by Transport for London, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) in Boston, and the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) in Hong Kong ­— brought together 25 executive-level managers and transportation experts from 13 major urban transit agencies, including New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Paris, in addition to the three sponsoring agencies.

MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Professor Nigel Wilson, director of the MIT Transit Group, launched the roundtable with an energetic description of the meeting as “an excellent opportunity for participants to exchange ideas, thoughts, and experiences in dealing with transit management, planning and operations, strategies, as well as the current challenges and opportunities facing public transit systems worldwide.” Moreover, the roundtable provided a venue for the MIT Transit Lab research team to present relevant research findings to an audience of large-city transit agency leaders. 

Following Wilson’s introduction was a welcoming speech from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) Secretary Stephanie Pollack — with a brief elucidation of the current technology issues facing the new management of the MBTA in Boston ­— and a keynote presentation from MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Professor Emilio Frazzoli, director of the Transportation at MIT Initiative on the “Autonomy and the Future of Urban Mobility.”

Held on MIT campus, the roundtable involved a myriad of interesting discussions. Shadowing the initial presentations were a series of themed open discussions:

At the event’s conclusion, one staff member and three students in the MIT Transit Lab presented brief graduate student research summaries on the following topics: Sanchez-Martinez on schedule-free high-frequency transit; CEE graduate student Cecilia Viggiano SM ’13 on using automatically collected data to inform network planning; CEE graduate student Anson Stewart SM '14 on collaborative, accessibility-based stakeholder engagement for transit projects; and CEE alumna Yiwn Zhu SM '14 on a modeling framework for passengers assignment to trains based on automated data under near capacity operation.

Reprinted with permission of MIT News