This week is Earth Week and tomorrow, in NYC, The New York Times is hosting the 2013 Energy for Tomorrow Conference with the theme Building Sustainable Cities. I am very much looking forward to taking part in this event and hearing experts on energy, sustainable buildings, urban food supply, technology, and transport and traffic speak and discuss how we, together, can achieve more livable cities in this century.
I will be part of the discussion on Transport and Traffic moderated by The New York Times OpEd columnist, Joe Nocera. The other speakers in my session are:
Walter Hook, president, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy,
Peder Jensen, head of programme, governance and networks, European Environment Agency,
Naveen Lamba, intelligent transportation lead, IBM, and
Janette Sadik-Khan, NYC transportation commissioner.
I plan on discussing the (in)famous Braess paradox in which the addition of a new road may make all travelers/drivers in the network worse off in terms of an increase in travel time as well as the milk run freight paradox, where increasing the load factor (as often used by policy-makers as a means of improving freight efficiency), under certain conditions, can increase total costs and total emissions. The latter was discovered by Niklas Arvidsson, a doctoral student at the School of Business, Economics and Law, where I hold a Visiting Professorship (as part of my sabbatical this year from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst).
I will also be highlighting the importance of supply chains and city logistics for sustainable cities. This is a topic that I am passionate about and my most recent accepted paper, "Design of Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities," is in press in the journal, Environment & Planning B.
The full agenda of the energy conference can be viewed here.
Posts
