The paper appeared in Transportation Research Part B shortly after the new year. It is our second TR-B publication on considering moral principles in transit design. Congratulations to Tianxing for another job done well!
Please read this post for a brief introduction of the topic and preprint.
The paper joint with two of my former students, Hongyu Zheng, and Kenan Zhang, just went online at Transportation Science. It is our second publication on this topic in TS. The title, as you can probably tell, was inspired by Peter Thiel’s proactive thesis: competition is for losers.
You may read a previous post about the paper back in 2023, where you can also find a preprint.
Our paper, entitled “What mobile phone data reveal about mobili ty patterns of teleworkers”, had just appeared in Transportation Research Part A.
Read an introduction in and download preprint here. Congratulations to Tianxing for another work done well!
Our paper on the use of modular autonomous vehicles for supporting freight-passenger co-modality operation appeared in Transportation Research Part B a few days ago. This work was supported by an NSF grant joint with Jane Lin and Kazuya Kawamura at University of Illinois at Chicago. You may dowload a preprint here in case you don’t have TR-B subscription.
We are set to start two new projects at the beginning of summer on Robotaxi and Paratransit, respectively. Both projects were selected for funding in the third-year competition at the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation. Ours are among the sixteen projects chosen this year.
A Chinese blog post I wrote several years ago was finally published online in the Journal of Transportation on April 3rd, 2025. Without Prof. Boyce’s encouragement, I would never have considered submitting the English version of this article to a prominent academic journal. To my pleasant surprise, both the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Kay Axhausen, and the two reviewers welcomed this clearly unconventional paper, recognizing its uniqueness in both content and style. Prof. Axhausen’s acceptance comment summed up it well, “Let’s go ahead with this unusual paper. There needs to be space for such pieces.”
You can read more about this paper in my blog post here, where you’ll also find a link to download a preprint if you don’t have access to the Transportation journal.
This quarter McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern did a story about my research – If memory serves me well, this is the first ever since I came here in 2006. The author of the article (Dan Smith) interviewed me about two months ago for about 30 minutes; and then a photographer came to take a bunch of pictures of me posing with my students in front a computer. Fun experience overall…
Entropy maximization for multi-class traffic assignment published in TR-B a few days ago. Check here for an introduction of the work and for preprint, which was posted on SSRN almost exactly a year ago. I believe this is the first paper published by Qianni Wang as a lead author since she joined my group in 2021. Congratulations to Qianni!
I just returned from the INFORMS Annual Conference, where I ran into several former students who are now professors across the globe—one from Europe, two from Asia, and one from the U.S. One of them, Yang Liu from National University of Singapore, won one of the 2023 best Transportation Science Paper Awards. 
It felt surprisingly fulfilling to witness your students achieve accomplishments beyond your own.
The picture was taken with the Editor in Chief of Transportation Science, my colleague Karen Smilowitz (left), and Yang (middle)
After an extended review process that lasted nearly two years, this paper finally came out in Transportation Research Part B. Thanks Ruijie, the first author, for his extraordinary patience and commitment to scholarship, which have become a rare commodity in today’s hyper-competitive research environment that prioritizes productivity over everything else.
A pre-print of the paper was posted in September 2022 on SSRN, under a different title and with slightly different contents. You may check it here if you don’t have Elsevier subscription.