Grant: Alliance Grants

Transportation is the second-largest source of Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Canada. Promoting people to change to sustainable mobility options (e.g., tramway, bus, and bike) is an important solution to reduce GHG emissions. Governments at various levels provide a number of attractive measures in favor of alternative transport (e.g., "carrots"), and others that aim to discourage unsustainable modes (e.g., "sticks"), to address this challenge of modal shift. The objective of this research program is to develop innovative models, new survey and experiment methods, and applicable tools to simulate and evaluate the effects of modal shift strategies on mobility and their contribution to GHG goals according to their type (Carrots, Sticks, or Combined). There are three main objectives:1- Understand travelers' decision-making under different carrots, sticks, or combined measures. Investigate the travel preference of different groups of people to help them shift to a sustainable mobility system. 2-Develop a gamification mobile application to carry out experiments in a real environment. Various carrots and sticks scenarios are proposed to improve sustainable mobilities. 3-Generate a simulation platform and develop techniques to estimate the GHG emissions in cities with different sizes based on the outputs of Obj.1.This program will increase the scientific information available to support government decision-making to achieve net-zero GHG emissions targets, which extends from successful research efforts conducted by the research consortium over the last 10 years. Related to the applicants, we assembled a multidisciplinary team of researchers from mechanical engineering, civil engineering, information systems engineering, and social science fields. Half of us are early career researchers and half are established researchers. Our partners come from the government, private-sector organizations and not-for-profit organizations. Both industrial leaders and academics have identified the problems addressed. Team-trained HQP will be an important outcome.