Kouros Mohammadian has already completed one study for ICT that developed strategies to encourage effective transportation solutions for the aging population. The final report was forwarded to the Illinois legislative research unit and played a role in the state’s policy decision to make transit services free for seniors.
Now, Prof. Mohammadian is working on a follow-up study that further evaluates the behavior of senior travelers and will help transit agencies promote effective transportation solutions to them. He also recently began work on an additional project for ICT that will provide a new freight dataset for making realistic decision for more efficient freight movement.
The perceived inconveniences seniors have (outside of safety/crime issues) from using public transit include: stops are too far from home, work, or other fixed point locations; the service is inconvenient for making intermediate stops; or the overall travel time on transit is just too long.
However, Prof. Mohammadian explains, “Increasing the stop frequency, replanning routes, and other service improvements will not be as effective if these improvements are not targeted towards how seniors organize their day currently, which can only be determined through activity surveys, and especially activity planning surveys which describe not only how the individuals’ days are organized but how they were planned.”
This second type of data collection opens up an additional area of travel demand management strategy because if it can be determined how individuals’ activity travel is planned, strategies to change the planning process and planning behavior in a beneficial manner can also be developed. The study’s current GPS-activity survey combines both of these areas of data collection, activity-travel and activity planning observations, which should give Prof. Mohammadian a more complete picture of how seniors are currently utilizing or not utilizing the transit system and a better understanding of the reasons behind this.
His study so far has resulted in two published journal papers, two other publications in conference proceedings, and couple of conference presentations.
For the freight study, Prof. Mohammadian says that the most important implication of the data collected for this study is that it will provide a realistic picture of commodity movement in a large scale behavioral freight movement model.
He explains, “Behavioral freight models are essential for having a reliable policy assessment tool, in the absence of which the resources will be inefficiently allocated and eventually the economy will be negatively affected. An efficient freight transportation system, on the other hand, keeps commodity movement cost at a reasonable rate, and therefore helps producers to deliver the final products at a lower cost. Policy makers also benefit from a behavioral freight model as their well-thought policies can help industries and eventually the entire population.”
Contrary to his approach, current freight studies typically have a limited focus in terms of industrial categories and geographical coverage; therefore, the large picture of goods movement behavior is not well understood. “This drawback is due to the absence of appropriate disaggregate data that has imposed several limitations on national level policy analysis tools. In the last few decades, globalization, ubiquitous applications of information technology, and deregulation of the freight industry, has encouraged the shippers to seek more efficient ways to do business in order to survive in this competitive market. This has highlighted the importance of including decision-makers’ characteristics in freight planning tools. The primary aim of our study is to address all these challenges in a comprehensive modeling framework. The ICT project is the key step toward that goal by providing the opportunity to collect a unique dataset of disaggregate fright movement.”
In addition to ICT studies, Dr. Mohammadian is the PI on other projects sponsored by FHWA, IDOT, and CMAP. He is the co-editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Transportation Letters and is serving in four committees of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) including Transportation Demand Forecasting, Traveler Behavior and Values, Telecommunications and Travel Behavior, and Travel Survey Methods. He is the co-chair of TRB’s New Technologies Sub-committee. He has received the 2008 Fred Burggraf and 2007 Charley Wootan awards from TRB recognizing his contributions to transportation research and several teaching awards including the 2009 Harold Simon Award for excellence in teaching.
Professor Mohammadian is obviously very busy with ICT and other studies as well as his position as an Associate Professor of Transportation Engineering in the Department of Civil and Materials Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But when he is not busy with these professional activities, he spends time with his wife and children, Kiana (8) and Ryan (almost 3). His family moved to the United States from Canada 8 years ago, so they take every opportunity they find to drive north of the border to visit family and friends in Toronto. They enjoy outdoor activities, and every summer they camp in Canada’s Algonquin Park where they enjoy hiking, canoeing, fishing, and swimming.