This is precisely the subject of the research conducted at Polytechnique Montréal by Catherine Morency and her team. A professor of civil engineering and world-renowned expert on mobility, she is the holder of the Chaire Mobilité, which assesses and implements sustainability in transport, and the Canada Research Chair in the Mobility of People, which models the interactions between different transportation modes. This leader in her field is engaged in analyzing individual mobility behaviours and their evolution, mapping out sustainable mobility strategies for communities and developing solutions for optimizing multimodal transit networks.
“To reduce inequalities of access to workplaces and other sites of activity, and to transit networks, especially for the most vulnerable segments of the population, our work uses quantifiable indicators to measure the equity of decisions made in favour of particular transportation modes. We are also refining the methods for evaluating the impacts of these solutions on health, greenhouse gas emissions, consumption of space and resources, travel conditions, and so on.”
The Polytechnique Montréal mobility chairs consist of multidisciplinary teams in engineering and humanities, who are developing an integrated understanding of the roles played by different modes of transportation in people’s daily mobility, along with tools to help authorities respond to the planning challenges faced by cities and transit networks.
In 2021, Professor Morency became the first woman to receive Polytechnique Montréal’s annual Award of Excellence in Research and Innovation. Known for the outstanding quality and scope of her research work, she is regularly invited to contribute to national andinternational forums on the environmental and social challenges of transit and travel modes, and is a member of the Québec government’s advisory committee on climate change.
