Elisabetta Cherchi, PhD
Principal Investigator and
Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering
Email: elisabetta.cherchi@nyu.edu
Duoaa Khalifa
Graduate Research Assistant and Web Team Master
Email: duoaa.khalifa@nyu.edu
Sustainable and Innovative Transport Demand (SIT-D Lab)
The research carried out at the SIT-D Lab focuses on advancing knowledge on how individuals take decisions with a particular focus on sustainable transport modes and transport innovations. There is an impellent need to better understand how to make users shift toward sustainable mobility and how to operationalize this into mathematical models that can be used to define policies. At the same time, the transport sector is witnessing major technological innovations that pose challenges in eliciting users’ preferences and forecasting their diffusion.
At the SIT-D Lab, we use:
- Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) environment to study consumers' choices for automated taxis in a controlled environment under different stimuli. We are also interested in understanding to which extent consumers' preferences change when elicited in an IVR compared to standard online surveys.
- Eye-tracking technology to explore the decision process leading to the choice. This provides important insights into the alternative heuristics used in sustainable transport choices, that are then operationalized in advanced demand models.
- Revenue optimisation and agent-based model that accounts for substitution effects and diffusion in the social network to predict the spatial and temporal diffusion of electric vehicles under supply constraints.
- A mixture of methodologies and techniques to study bounded rational behaviors and their impact on the efficacy of transport policies. We work in particular on the influence of habit (leading to inertia) and of social conformity in transport choices.