Dr. Alexander Erath Rusterholtz

Summary

Dr. Alex Erath leads as Principal Investigator the “Engaging Mobility” research project at the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) in Singapore. The research project which is funded by the National Research Foundation and ETH Zurich aims at understanding, modelling and simulating future mobility solutions for dense urban areas. Key research areas include the impact of the built environment on travel behaviour, in particular cycling and walking and and the use of Big Data sources to enhance agent-based transport simulation models. He also leads a research project in Switzerland that aims at quantifying the potential of pedestrian mobility in agglomerations and is sponsered by the Swiss federal roads office, FEDRO.

In his previous work at FCL, he managed the research module on Mobility and Transportation Planning and lead in this role the implementation and further development of the large-scale, agent-based transport demand model MATSim Singapore. He also directed the research project “Measuring Walkability” which was conducted for Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority and defined the first behaviorally-based walkability indicator.

He obtained his PhD in 2011 from ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) where he studied the vulnerability of transport infrastructure. His main research interests are multiagent, activity-based transport demand modeling, the interaction between transport infrastructure, the built environment and urban design as well as travel behaviour modeling. In this domain, he was involved various studies with a focus on revealed and stated preference surveys.