Transport and Covid-19: responses and resources

Young Researcher of the Year Award 2021

Daniel Jan Reck

2021 Winner

Daniel Jan Reck is the International Transport Forum’s 2021 Young Researcher of the Year Award. The German researcher, based at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, wins for his paper on shared micromobility use.

Daniel Jan Reck is researcher and lecturer in transport planning and policy at ETH Zurich and honorary research associate at the University of Sydney. He studies emerging urban transport modes such as shared e-scooters, bikes and shuttles, and their interactions with transport systems. Passionate about translating research into practice, he collaborates with several transport providers across Europe on making urban transport more sustainable. Prior to academia, Daniel worked in management consulting for several years. He holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge (UK) and a BSc from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany).

Read the Media Release "Micromobility: Why urbanites prefer bikes over e-scooters (or vice versa)"

Read the winning paper "Explaining shared micromobility usage, competition and mode choice by modelling empirical data from Zurich, Switzerland" 

Commuters prefer station-based micro-mobility services to free-floating alternatives

Two shared e scooters per soccer field 2 are a sufficient fleet density to satisfy average user demand in Zurich



About the Award

The International Transport Forum at the OECD organises an Annual Summit for Transport Ministers from around the world to meet with researchers, industry leaders and representatives of civil society and examine strategic policy issues facing the sector.

Continuing a long tradition of research on transport issues to inform the policy-making process, the International Transport Forum provides high-level research input to the Annual Summit. To encourage and reward creative reflection and analysis from young researchers, the International Transport Forum will once again present its “Young Researcher of the Year Award” in 2021.

The principal aim of the International Transport Forum’s Young Researcher of the Year Award is to highlight the importance of transport research for sound transport policy formulation and implementation, and to foster closer links between transport policy and research. For 2021, the theme of the International Transport Forum’s Summit is “Transport Innovation for Sustainable Development: Reshaping Mobility in the Wake of Covid-19”.

Criteria  

The Young Researcher of the Year Award is open to researchers under 35 years of age at the time of closing of applications who have undertaken the research presented in the submitted paper in an institution, university or consultancy firm located in a member country of the International Transport Forum. The researcher must be the main author of the paper.

The research paper may analyse any aspect related to transport innovation for sustainable development, such as, but not limited to, innovation with regards to new mobility services, vehicle technologies, transport infrastructure provision, transport planning approaches, their impact on the economy or society, or the required institutional or regulatory frameworks to foster innovation in transport. Ideally, but not necessarily, the paper also addresses relevant aspects of the Covid-19 crisis, such as how innovation in transport contributed to managing the crisis, and opportunities to ‘build back better’ after the crisis.

The work can be quantitative or qualitative and come from any of the academic fields linked to transport and should show to be relevant for policy making. The winning paper will propose advances from the current state of knowledge in the domain and be methodologically rigorous.

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