Transitioning to a Sustainable Transportation System in a Metropolitan Context

The majority of the global population dwells in urban areas. Fast urbanization has led to numerous sustainability-related issues, such as excess carbon emissions, air pollution, and environmental injustice, which are urgent to resolve in a climate-changing world. This research seminar demonstrates my interdisciplinary work on advancing urban sustainability. It starts from establishing a quantitative modeling framework for carbon and air pollution emissions from Canada’s largest metropolitan transportation system, the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Personal carbon footprint is combined with granular socio-economic, land use, and travel activity data to investigate the existing environmental and energy justice concerns, revealing the association between high social disadvantage and low mobility-related emissions. Other than modeling, this seminar presents how to sense and analyze urban system externalities in real-world urban environments.