We are happy to announce that the lab has been awarded two new grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Together, these awards support two of the main threads of research that define our lab: place-based mobility and location privacy.
Insight Grant: Micromobility for Whom?
Our SSHRC Insight Grant will fund Micromobility for whom? Analyzing equity in access to shared urban mobility services, a large-scale study into who actually benefits from the explosive growth of shared e-scooters and e-bikes in cities around the world. The grant includes collaborators: Vanessa da Silva Brum Bastos (University of Canterbury), Vanessa Frias-Martinez (University of Maryland), and Henrikki Tenkanen (Aalto University).
As cities increasingly hand off bike-share systems to commercial micromobility operators, we still know surprisingly little about who is riding these services and who is being left out. This project will examine the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of micromobility users across ten international cities, how usage patterns differ across groups within those cities, and how these patterns have shifted over the past five years. Using a multi-city survey paired with spatiotemporal analysis of trip-level data, the project aims to close a gap that existing single-city studies haven’t been able to address.
The goal is not just academic. By grounding the analysis in transportation justice and structural equity frameworks, we hope to inform policy tools such as geographic coverage requirements, discounted access programs, and transparent data sharing between operators and cities… helping ensure the benefits of micromobility (safety, public health, environmental, and economic) are shared more broadly.
Insight Development Grant: Privacy in Place
Our second award, an Insight Development Grant, will support Privacy in Place: Investigating Socio-Spatial Variabilities in Privacy Concerns.
Location data can reveal far more than a string of coordinates, it can expose health conditions, relationships, and identities in ways that carry real risk depending on who is watching and where someone has been. Yet most privacy-preserving tools still take a one-size-fits-all approach, applying the same obfuscation regardless of place, recipient, or individual comfort level.
This project asks two questions: How do privacy concerns about location data vary by the type of place visited (a park versus a medical clinic, for instance), by who might see that information (a government agency versus a family member), and across different socioeconomic and demographic groups? And can we design a dynamic geomasking method and prototype platform that responds to those differences, protecting sensitive visits while preserving the usefulness of shared location data? We’ll use a survey to map out these variations in concern and use the findings to build and test a prototype obfuscation platform, sharing results with government, industry, and non-profit stakeholders working in the privacy space.
Building the Team
Both projects will run over the coming years, and we are actively recruiting graduate and undergraduate students to join the lab and contribute to this work… from survey design and spatial analysis to prototype development. If you are interested in equity in urban mobility, location privacy, or geospatial methods more broadly, keep an eye on our openings or reach out.
We are grateful to the Canadian government for supporting both of these projects and look forward to sharing our progress as the research unfolds.