<p dir="ltr">The transportation sector is responsible for 41% of greenhouse gas emissions in California, and 70% of those come from light-duty passenger vehicles. Conventional vehicles also emit air pollutants that damage human health and often disproportionately impact low income and vulnerable communities. Additionally, congestion due to vehicle traffic may have a number of negative impacts, many of which are disportionately burdening already vulnerable communities, including longer commute times,higher maintenance, and additional fuel burdens. While there are many clean mobility solutions ranging from expansion of public transit to the development of walkable cities, light-duty vehicles will play an important role in the short to mid-term timeline in the many regions that lie outside of major metropolitan areas. Electric vehicles (EVs) are capable of filling this role, however adoption of EVs is lacking in the vulnerable communities that could benefit most from this technology, due to factors such as upfront cost, lack of information, and poorly-designed uptake programs. These populations have barriers that are often unknown to decision makers and systems designers that prevent them from participating in the clean mobility transition; we seek to elevate the voices of the vulnerable populations in our research, uncover these hidden barriers, and embed equity in every step of our processes.</p><p dir="ltr">This talk focuses on our community engagement efforts in Sonoma County, a small suburban county north of San Francisco with a population of a half million people, and how those efforts are informing how we design our quantitative systems models and research outputs. Early this summer, we plan to conduct a combination of observations, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups with members in underserved communities in Sonoma County, including members in lower socioeconomic statuses and communities of color. Our goal is to uncover the barriers to accessing clean mobility, decision-making regarding current transportation choices, and challenges surrounding personal transportation.</p>

Embedding Equity and Elevating Community Voices in the Transition to Clean Mobility

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.