On December 21, 2018, Bureau of International Cooperation of National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) officially released the approval notice on the cooperation between National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe (JPI UE). The project bid by the New transportation economy and management research team from Beijing Jiaotong University, Urban Public Administration and Service Set-up: New Urban Mobility Management and Policy (U-PASS), was honorably approved. In 2018, NSFC and JPI UE received a total of 128 applications, of which 11 were subsidized.
U-PASS project aims to promote the sustainable development of urban transportation from the perspective of new urban mobility management and policy. Through modeling analysis and empirical research on urban traffic, the project provides innovative ideas for urban traffic service and policy design, as well as experimental design and model development of new traffic. Backed by the cooperation among such colleges, universities and industrial institutions in China and Europe as Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing Transport Institute, Zhejiang University, the International Transport Research Center of the University of Leeds and VU University Amsterdam, it intends to combine the practice of Todays urban development with the theoretical research to explore the frontier issues on the sustainable development of urban traffic from various perspectives. The project coordinators are Professor Xu Meng, Professor Erik Verhoef from VU University Amsterdam and the key Chinese researchers including Professor Wang Yacan from Beijing Jiaotong University, Chen Xiqun, the researcher at Zhejiang University's Hundred Talents Program, and Zhou Xuesong.
The project undertakes four researches, namely, public administration and governance, service innovation and policy, traffic modeling and optimization, and traffic behavior experiments. The project team brings together leading figures at home and abroad in such fields as transportation economics, transportation management, transportation system modeling, big data analysis, systems science and engineering, and psychology, and young and middle-aged academic backbones. Focusing on the cross-merging of academic teams, it boasts rich research experience and accumulated outcomes.
The project is backed by the long-term close cooperation of education and scientific research in thesis writing, scientific research projects and talent training among the research teams from China, the UK and the Netherlands. The Netherlands partner is Professor Erik Verhoef, the director of the Department of Space Economics in VU University Amsterdam(Chief Professor), and his research team. Professor Erik is an authoritative expert in international transportation economics and traffic management, ranking in the top 3% among REPEC's global economists. He has published over 100 papers in top journals concerning traffic management and transportation economics, whose outcomes have been widely recognized and cited by the academic community. VU University Amsterdam stands as an internationally renowned research university and its Department of Space Economics has gathering of scholars with the worlds most fruitful researches in environment, city and transportation economics.
The UK partner for this project is the research team led by Professor Simon Sheperd and Professor Susan Grant-Muller from the Institute of Transport Studying (ITS) at the University of Leeds. Professor Grant-Muller is internationally renowned for the studying of public information and Professor Simon Shepherd specializes in traffic modeling and policy optimization. As one of the most influential transportation research centers in the world, ITS is highly praised by international counterparts for its first-class research in the field of transportation and is the UK's first academic institution authenticated by ISO 9001 research management.
