Dr. Kari (Edison) Watkins (CE ’97) thinks it might be a good thing for Americans to cool down their love affair with the automobile. Her research promises to make that separation a little less painful.
“A lot of people think of public transportation as a stinky old bus that you have to wait for,” says Watkins, an assistant professor of civil engineering whose work has focused on collective transit, alternative transportation, and real-time user information software.
"But if the service respects me, by being a nice, frequent, on-time vehicle, people change their attitude.”