I am deligted to have recieved a Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship this year! In addition to providing tuition support, the fellowship fully funds my participation in the 2019 Transportation Research Board Conference.

This fellowship will fund my current research project investigating the design of route-based congestion-reducing incentive structures for Transportation Network Company fleets. This research extends results in the literature that controlling and optimizing the route and departure time choices of a small portion of vehicles can dramatically reduce total congestion in the network and even approach system-optimal traffic flow. There are practical hurdles to the realization of such schemes because there is no cost-effective way to influence the route choices of individual vehicles. Connected vehicle fleets, however, provide the communication infrastructure for real-time precision interventions. Uber and Lyft already use dynamic pricing to incentivize drivers to relocate to areas of high demand; my research aims to incentivize them to adjust pick-up times and use specific paths through the network. Should connected vehicle technology continue to proliferate, route-choice and departure time incentives could be applied more broadly. Connected, automated, or autonomous vehicles may simply opt-in via a municipal application programming interface, further lowering the cost of incentives and increasing their efficacy.