University of Texas looks at automated vehicles and underserved populations

© Shutterstock

A civil engineering professor at the University of Texas at Arlington will be using grant funding to evaluate the use of automated vehicles and how they relate to underserved populations across a five-state area.

Using a $106,000 Tran-SET grant from the University Transportation Center at Louisiana State, Stephen Mattingly will build a framework to evaluation the information from Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Oklahoma — the states Tran-Set represents in the U.S. Department of Transportation Region 6.

“We will be looking at environmental justice populations. If you’re a person or a family that’s low-income and transit-dependent, we’re trying to make sure that projected technological advancements do not exacerbate existing disparities or create new challenges,” Mattingly said. “Without careful attention, a huge risk of any new benefits coming to transportation systems is that it may not accrue to vulnerable populations. We will be looking at different planning scenarios that better serve those underserved populations before they get left behind.”

Mattingly said an example of potential disparities is the insurance market. One state may have an insurance market that supports automated vehicles while another does not, he said. Since the country does not have a federal insurance market, Mattingly said his project could examine a potential framework to work from.

“Some states are making infrastructure investment for electric vehicles; others are not,” Mattingly said. “How does that affect the emergence of future scenarios? Those are questions that we hope the project will answer.”

Melanie Sattler, interim chair and professor in the UTA Department of Civil Engineering, said the work will help underserved populations.

“There are so many different underserved populations in both urban and rural areas, as well as differences in existing infrastructure, among these five states,” Sattler said. “This project will develop a toolkit of strategies to help public agencies react to and proactively pursue policies that will work for their locales.”

In 2016, the U.S. DOT awarded nearly $300 million in grants to 32 University Transportation Centers for the advanced research into critical transportation challenges facing the country.