$2.85M Federal Funding to Study the Climate Impact of Travel Behaviour Changes Leverages UBC-Rogers Partnership Research

Professor Mahmudur Fatmi, a Civil Engineering professor at UBC-Okanagan (UBC-O) with a focus on transportation, is the PI on a recently awarded $2.85M federal grant from Environment and Climate Change Canada for “Integrated Development of Transport Data, Model and Community Outreach Tool for Urban and Rural Regions.” The goal is to provide insights on the impact of changes in travel behaviour induced by advances in information and communication technologies and unprecedented socio-economic shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic–and longer-term implications for the Metro Vancouver and Okanagan regions. The research will develop new data and models to predict land use, vehicle ownership, travel and in-home activity patterns, and transport emissions.

The project converges the multidisciplinary talents of researchers from the two UBC campuses: (Naomi Zimmerman (Mechanical Engineering, UBC-Vancouver (UBC-V)), Mohammad Khalad Hasan (Computer Science , UBC-O), Kasun Hewage (School of Engineering, UBC-O), Andrea MacNeill (Medicine, UBC-V), Jon Corbett (Community Culture and Global Studies, UBC-O) Rehan Sadiq (Civil Engineering, UBC-O), and 14 partners from different levels of government, including municipal, provincial, and federal agencies.

As Professor Fatmi says, “This is a fantastic and timely opportunity to learn and contribute to decarbonizing Canada’s transportation sector. The research will come full circle, by collecting data from the public, using it to develop models, and going back to the public and stakeholders with results, focusing on the Okanagan and Metro Vancouver regions.”

Professor Fatmi leads the Integrated Transportation Research (UiTR) Laboratory, a transportation and land use research facility at UBC-O. He is also a co-Investigator on the “Intelligent Transportation Data Platform and Environmental Sensing for Sustainable Cities” project led by Professor Zimmerman that is part of the UBC-Rogers Partnership on 5G research and development managed by ICICS. Professor Fatmi’s project presents an opportunity to leverage the multimodal Okanagan road network created from the Rogers 5G research to support model development.