Authors: Susan Shaheen, UC ITS RIMI Director, Professor-In-Residence, UC Berkeley; Laura Podolsky, Executive Director, UC Institute of Transportation Studies
We’re pleased to unveil the Mobility 10x: Accelerating Transportation Innovation in California research magazine, a comprehensive compendium of findings, insights, and actionable research generated by the Resilient and Innovative Mobility Initiative (RIMI) over the last four years.
At a moment when California’s transportation system is at a critical turning point, the magazine underscores a central theme of RIMI’s work: the need to move from innovation to implementation. Long-standing assumptions—cheap driving, unlimited road capacity, predictable travel patterns, and inherently resilient infrastructure—no longer hold in the face of climate change, technological disruption, inequity, and shifting travel behavior. RIMI research shows that durable progress depends on coordinated policies that deliver affordability, safety, resilience, and emissions reductions at scale.
Across the magazine, readers will find research-grounded insights on:
- Decarbonization, highlighting uneven progress across sectors and the importance of coordinated planning, smart charging, and energy-transportation integration to ensure cleaner air and equitable outcomes.
- Public transit at a crossroads, examining fiscal pressures, ridership recovery, and the role of land use, pricing, and service quality in rebuilding strong, competitive transit systems.
- Safety and road management, demonstrating why slower speeds, redesigned streets, and limits on road expansion are essential to reducing traffic deaths and improving public health.
- Resilience in the face of disruption, showing how earthquakes, wildfires, and other shocks demand planning approaches that treat disruption as a normal condition rather than an exception.
- Emerging mobility and workforce impacts, exploring how ridehailing, micromobility, automation, and evolving labor conditions can either strengthen or undermine transportation systems depending on policy choices.
Taken together, the Mobility 10x Magazine offers policymakers, planners, and agency leaders a roadmap—not a silver bullet—for navigating uncertainty and applying evidence-based research to real-world decisions. It reflects RIMI’s core premise: that California’s transportation challenges are deeply interconnected, and that progress requires coordinated action across technology, pricing, land use, labor, governance, and community partnership.📘 Download the Mobility 10x Magazine (PDF) to explore how UC ITS research is helping advance a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable transportation future for California.
