Getting around town — any town — is not as simple as it used to be. And it’s getting harder all the time.
The threats imposed on infrastructure run the gamut — from climate change to cyberattacks to aging systems increasingly prone to failure — forcing a constant evolution of the transportation arteries that course through cities and connect communities. Autonomous vehicles offer promise, but consumers are understandably wary. Trains and buses have historically been greeted, at least in Southern California, with skepticism.
Sizing up that landscape — and fortifying against those challenges — is at the heart of the work of the UCLA Center of Excellence on New Mobility and Automated Vehicles, led by Jiaqi Ma, an associate professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. Informally known as the Mobility Center of Excellence, it is a hub of interdisciplinary research and innovation, tackling the complexities of integrating mobility technology, striving for equitable access and advancing environmentally responsible approaches to driving.
Ma’s research focuses on crafting sustainable and efficient transportation systems that can withstand the burgeoning pressures of urbanization, climate change and technological advancement. His work, carried out in a lab independent of UCLA’s Mobility Center, has positioned him at the cutting edge of smart city development efforts. It also has made him one of the nation’s foremost experts on autonomous vehicles, which may — or may not — soon become a significant part of the modern transportation network.
“We’re looking at automated vehicles, small infrastructure with the sensing, detection, prediction and decision-making capabilities,” Ma said. “We also work on large-scale system analysis — developing data-driven models, machine-learning models — or we stimulate and analyze mobility patterns.”
The work puts Ma in collaboration with some of Southern California’s most vital transit agencies such as Caltrans and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. He is also working with backers of the 2028 Olympic Games, which are slated for Los Angeles and whose champions have suggested could be executed “car-free” or close to it.
Quiet yet approachable, Ma received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from Beijing Jiaotong University. He relocated to the United States in 2011 to attend the University of Virginia, where he completed another master’s degree and a Ph.D. in advanced transportation systems, with a focus on connected vehicles. Since his graduation in 2014, Ma has worked at the Virginia Transportation Research Council and the Federal Highway Administration. He has led research projects worth more than $20 million.
The University of Cincinnati, where Ma worked from 2017 to 2020, spotlighted him in its Office of Research Strategic Team’s Research + Innovation Week.
It credited him for his work “in future-forward fields that help both Cincinnati and UC attract world-class research talent who want to collaborate to solve real-world problems and top-notch student talent who are excited to learn from them and make a difference,” said Jennifer Krivickas, senior associate vice president for integrated research at the university.
Life among robots
Once merely a dream of futurists, robotic vehicles now prowl American streets, including some in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the company Waymo has established pilot projects.
“It’s a promising technology that is gradually expanding,” Ma said. “In the next five or 10 years, we will see a significant increase in deployment of these vehicles.” Automated cars could help fill a gap in the regional transportation networks of many cities, he said, getting bus and subway riders the “last mile” to their destinations.
That makes the vehicles valuable not just for their own contribution but for the strength they deliver to other systems.
“Waymo looked at the data and said Waymo is much safer than human drivers. But other researchers say that under other conditions, Waymo will perform worse than human drivers, partially because there’s not enough data just yet,” Ma said.
Automated vehicles may navigate certain situations better than humans. Autonomous cars don’t get sleepy; they don’t get drunk; they aren’t susceptible to road rage. But they also lack judgment, and they may be vulnerable to a sudden burst of variables. That makes it difficult to offer a single appraisal regarding their safety, he noted.
“In simple driving conditions, Waymo vehicles can be safer,” he said. “However, a more complicated scenario like navigating through a complex intersection or adverse weather conditions or a complex work zone can be tricky.”
Nevertheless, early studies of automated cars compare them favorably to human drivers. The National Health Service Administration recently concluded that 94% of crashes in automated vehicles are due to, or at least partially attributed to, human errors. Research conducted by KIA, a South Korean automobile manufacturer, found that self-driving cars may be safer than human drivers — or at least might be soon.
“With the sensors and cameras monitoring and guiding, these cars can not only sense their environment but also can anticipate what’s coming up ahead, which humans are not capable of,” KIA wrote. “They may one day make the world a safer place by eliminating human error and reducing the number of car crashes.”
A study published by researchers from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, General Motors and Cruise corroborates KIA and Ma’s safety insights as well.
Comparing 5.6 million miles of human ride-hail driving to 1 million miles of autonomous driving in San Francisco, the study found that human drivers had significantly higher crash rates, with 50.5 crashes per million miles compared to 23 for self-driving cars. Humans also caused more injuries and fatalities.
Ma’s research into the place of autonomous vehicles within cities has probed not just safety but also efficacy. Even if the cars are safe, they may still have other implications for urban mobility. Do they contribute to traffic or alleviate it? Do they add to emissions or reduce them?
His findings reveal hesitancy toward smart infrastructure, especially sensors and cameras that communicate with vehicles about traffic flow and ramp congestion, amid concerns over traffic jams involving autonomous cars — including a well-publicized mashup in San Francisco, where robot cars squared off in a parking lot, honking at each other for hours and driving residents to distraction.
It comes as little surprise, then, that consumers still are wary.
“(In 2021), we conducted a survey to understand people’s adoption and attitudes toward this technology,” Ma said. “Compared to 2017, the results hadn’t changed — people’s attitudes are still skeptical.”
But familiarity may eventually soften some of that doubt. The B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences at UCLA advances research in risk analysis, safety and resilience across complex systems — including autonomous vehicles. Its faculty awarded Ma $7.5 million to support his research on the impacts of new mobility technologies and automated vehicles.
Ma’s work with the Federal Highway Administration also was highlighted by the Department of Transportation, which said that his projects “improve strategic and tactical decision-making for cooperative vehicles operating on connected infrastructure, making the driving experience safer and more efficient.”
Is the future safe? Is it equitable?
Robot cars are a curiosity with great possibility but the future of American transportation goes well beyond the potential of those vehicles. It is complex, multifaceted and vulnerable.
The Mobility Center’s Risk Institute works to identify potential safety hazards, from natural disasters to cyberthreats and aging infrastructure. Through stimulating scenarios, it devises strategies for risk prevention, focusing on both asset management and prioritizing maintenance efforts.
“We have a project looking at hurricanes, working on multiple states in the southern parts of Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, where we are helping them predict the impact of potential hurricanes and the emergency response agency and the Department of Transportation can work together to deploy adequate strategies,” Ma said.
Further, the Mobility Center is committed to championing equity within transportation, ensuring that advancements uplift all communities — with a special focus on empowering underserved communities. The future of mobility also includes pedestrians, wheelchair users and scooter riders who often struggle to navigate through urban environments designed for conventional vehicles.
Through the power of advanced sensing and perception technologies, the Mobility Center employs real-time data to improve safety by alerting vehicles to the presence of at-risk individuals.
Ma’s work extends to improving transportation access for people living in disadvantaged communities — where unreliable transit options hinder access to jobs and essential services, perpetuating a cycle of poverty that can feel insurmountable.
“We get data, we track them, we quantify this type of accessibility and identify where the problems are,” Ma said. “We deal with questions like how to better design the system so people have access to it.
“We talk about new road pollution as well, finding that disadvantaged communities are subject to extra pollution because they live near freeways or congested areas,” he added, echoing concerns of activists in Los Angeles and beyond. “That’s not right. Our solutions can identify those hot spots and provide digital support, and we have researchers also working on universal mobility programs.”
In broader strokes, Ma’s efforts are intended to bridge spaces in existing research — to look into the future and imagine transportation not just as tinkering with existing systems but rather in terms of its vast potential and vulnerability.
“Our job is to identify all these gaps, talk to all the stakeholders, communities, to understand what needs to be done, what best practices they need,” Ma said. “It’s our job to synthesize information — have experts understand information and provide a white paper about critical conclusions to impact society and identify urgent needs.”
