Socially-Aware Evaluation Framework for Transportation

Abstract: Technological advancements are rapidly changing traffic management in cities. Massive adoption of mobile devices and cloud-based applications have created new mechanisms for urban traffic control and management. Specifically, navigation applications have impacted cities in multiple ways by rerouting traffic on their streets. As different routing strategies distribute traffic differently across the city network, understanding these differences across multiple dimensions is highly relevant for policymakers. In this paper, we develop a holistic framework of indicators, called Socially-Aware Evaluation Framework for Transportation (SAEF), that will assist in understanding how traffic routing and the resultant traffic dynamics impact city metrics, with the intent of avoiding unintended consequences and adhering to city objectives. SAEF is a holistic decision framework formed as an assembled set of city performance indicators grounded in the literature. The selected indicators can be evaluated for cities of various sizes and at the urban scale. The SAEF framework is presented for four Bay Area cities, for which we compare three different routing strategies. Our intent with this work is to provide an evaluation framework that enables reflection on the consequence of policies, traffic management strategies and network changes. With an ability to model out proposed traffic management strategies, the policymaker can consider the trade-offs and potential unintended consequences.