Sustainable Mobility

Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course

Common Course ID:CE 504: Sustainable Mobility
CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait

Abstract: This open textbook is being utilized in a Transportation Engineering course for undergraduate or graduate students by Dr. Shams Tanvir at California State University- Long Beach. The open textbook prepares students to contribute towards a carbon-neutral mobility future. The textbook focuses on designing streets for modes that have almost no carbon emissions, namely walking and cycling. Additionally, the textbook explores the potential for vehicle electrification and ridesharing to reduce the carbon impacts of automobility. Students will be able to identify the pathways involving transportation choices leading to climate change. The main motivation to adopt an open textbook was the lack of a single textbook covering the topic of sustainable mobility. Transportation Engineering students needed to purchase multiple expensive textbooks totaling over $500 to cover the breadth and the depth of the course content. Most student access the open textbook in an online format through the website Pressbooks.

CE 504: Sustainable Mobility
Brief Description of course highlights:  

Analysis and design for sustainable mobility from an interdisciplinary perspective, including pedestrians, bicyclists, electrification, technologies, and transit. Addresses economy, climate change, environment, and equity issues. (3 hours lecture, problem) Letter grade only (A-F).

Student population: 

Civil Engineering and City and Regional Planning (CRP) Graduate students; these students have completed an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering or CRP with at least one year experience in designing Engineering infrastructure using advanced mathematics and computerized design tools.

Learning or student outcomes:   

• CLO1- Design bike facilities – calculate Level of Service (LOS) for bike facilities, understand the safety features, design bike and scooter share facilities, and intersection control for bicycles.
• CLO2- Design pedestrian facilities – calculate LOS, intersection management for pedestrians, conceptualize and implement components of complete streets.
• CLO3- Estimate energy consumption and emissions from automobility.
• CLO4- Explain the concepts of light-duty and heavy-duty vehicle electrification.
• CLO5- Analyze and design transportation and charging infrastructure in alignment with expanding electrification needs.
• CLO6- Formulate policies for alternate fuel vehicles, shared mobility, and automation.
• CLO7- Emphasize the needs of disadvantaged communities and environmental justice.
• CLO8- Calculate the energy and environmental footprints of the existing scenario and the proposed improvements.

Textbook or OER/Low cost Title: Sustainable Mobility

Brief Description: The purpose of this book is to prepare students to contribute towards a carbon-neutral mobility future. A major part of this book focuses on designing streets for modes that have almost no carbon emissions: walking and cycling, with an emphasis on cycling, since bicycle trips have the greatest potential to replace car trips. The second part of the book discusses different pathways for vehicle electrification and sharing to reduce the carbon impacts of automobility. The third part of the book introduces students to actionable tools and policies to shape transportation choices that prevent climate change.

Please provide a link to the resource  
https://uta.pressbooks.pub/sustainablemobility/
Authors: Shams Tanvir

Student access:  Pressbooks website using the link above. 

Supplemental resources: N/A

Provide the cost savings from that of a traditional textbook.
Approximately $500/student

License*: Sustainable Mobility by Shams Tanvir is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. (CC BY NC SA)

OER/Low Cost Adoption Process

Provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost option.
Sustainable Mobility is an emerging and evolving field within transportation engineering. Most available resources are spread around multiple textbooks and newly published reports. Our OER text compiled those resources in a single location; provided the students an opportunity to save hundreds of dollars on textbook costs.

How did you find and select the open textbook for this course?
Consulted the College of Engineering librarian, other faculty in Transportation Engineering, and browsed OER sites.

Sharing Best Practices: Creating OER is time consuming. Please ensure taking help from others who are experts in OER or have created an OER textbook themselves. Create a circle of OER creators where you can communicate and share experiences.
 

Describe any key challenges you experienced, how they were resolved  and lessons learned.

There is a scarcity of quality OER materials for newer and in-depth Engineering topics. One needs to spend time to curate OER journal articles and create a meaningful way of representing that information as most of the OER journal materials are non-derivative type. In addition, there is a great scarcity of problem sets and solutions in the OER space. An OER developer needs to be aware of these issues for designing an OER textbook in an advanced area.

Shams Tanvir, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE 
Please provide your title and your institution. I I am an Assistant Professor in Civil Engineering at the California State University- Long Beach. I teach CE 130: Surveying and Mapping, CE 426: Transportation Engineering, and CE 504: Sustainable Mobility.

Please provide a link to your university page.
https://www.csulb.edu/college-of-engineering/civil-engineering-construction-engineering-management/page/dr-shams-tanvir
Please describe the courses/course numbers that you teach.

The purpose of this course is to prepare students to contribute to a carbon-neutral mobility future. To meet the growing need to mitigate the challenges of transportation sector decarbonization, Civil Engineering students need to know how to design streets for modes that have almost no carbon emissions.   This transformative approach to infrastructure design and operations is needed over incremental carbon reduction techniques taught in traditional curricula. This new course will train engineering students on existing tools and policy levers that can be used to incorporate emerging transportation technologies in a sustainable, equitable, and efficient manner.

The course is designed for graduate transportation engineering and city and regional planning students. The undergraduate seniors will be able to absorb the materials, given they have already taken fundamental courses on transportation engineering and planning, including traffic engineering and highway design.

A major part of this course focuses on designing streets for modes that have almost no carbon emissions: walking and cycling, with an emphasis on cycling, since bicycle trips have the greatest potential to replace car trips. The second part of the course discusses different pathways for vehicle electrification and sharing to reduce the carbon impacts of automobility. The third part of the course introduces students to actionable tools and policies to shape transportation choices that prevent climate change.

Describe your teaching philosophy and any research interests related to your discipline or teaching.

The study of transportation involves the understanding of complex interactions between technology and society. My role as an instructor is to inspire students to explore this multi-disciplinary front with a problem-solving mentality. I believe it is a teacher’s job to enable students to succeed in their careers. I follow a client-centric approach with the students where students are open to consulting with me, and I make sure students get timely and constructive feedback.

My teaching style is to motivate the students using real examples that describe the economic and social implications of the problem. I have successfully applied this style to design and develop a graduate-level course, Sustainable Mobility. I invited guest speakers from the practitioner community covering emerging topics in sustainable mobility including complete streets, protected intersections, and community climate action plans. The students also participated in two group projects in which they selected problems from the community; one was related to improving biking infrastructure on the campus, and another was creating a Safe Routes to School design for a local elementary school. In both projects, students learned the required theoretical concepts as they conducted community outreach, diagnosed the problems, and innovated solutions. My evaluations reflected positively after implementing these changes. Some of the comments were “Great instructor and one of my favorites”, and “Dr. Tanvir has a lot of knowledge and enthusiasm in the subject area. He cares about his students”. 

The project-based learning approach puts a time constraint on teaching. My solution to overcoming this constraint is through a new teaching paradigm called the ‘flipped- classroom’. I have applied this technique to teach Design Principles in Civil Engineering where students watch recorded videos, participate in a pre-lecture test, and spend classroom time in collaborative problem-solving. This approach proved useful in delivering hands-on training such as traffic simulation and modeling to the students. I also take advantage of online formative assessment tools such as ‘socrative’ and interactive features of google slides. I usually get the support of example problems drawn from the students’ familiar environments. For example, my traffic engineering students learned geometric design and my traffic operations students learned to analyze intersections by solving problems on campus.

The domain of transportation engineering is evolving rapidly, and multiple disciplines are competing for the opportunity to lead its development. My long-term goal is to enhance and diversify the capabilities of civil engineering students in shaping the future of transportation. In this effort, I try to involve my students in my research work and use data from my research as classroom examples. My undergraduate students have learned to use Bluetooth sensors and GPS devices. Conversely, students have given me feedback on the simulation model or the mobile application I have developed for my research. 

Please attach a photo of you (or link to where it appears)

https://www.csulb.edu/college-of-engineering/civil-engineering-construction-engineering-management/page/dr-shams-tanvir