Co-Designing Transit

CMU Human-Computer Interaction Institute project on the future of transit work and human-machine teaming with transit automation technologies

View the Project on GitHub Augmented-Design-Capability-Studio/codesigningtransit

Full-sized yellow bus on a city road with the front and back doors open at a bustop. Two people are peparing to board, another passengers is standing at the front with the operator, and several other passengers are are already onboard chatting in the back.There is a boy outside of the bus listening to headphones, a man pushing another in a wheelchair, and still another riding by the scene on a bike. At the bus shelter, there is a man and a woman stilled seated waiting for their bus to arrive.

Co-Designing the Future of Transit

Led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, this project aims to explore and shape the future of transit in an era increasingly influenced by automation technologies. While promising, the introduction of automated vehicle technology presents significant operational and safety challenges, especially in the intricate and unpredictable realm of public transit. Our research emphasizes that despite advancements in automation, skilled human operators will remain indispensable for navigating complex environments and ensuring passenger safety.

In collaboration with the AFL-CIO Technology Institute, the Transport Workers Union of America, and the Amalgamated Transit Union, our work aims to co-design future transit by directly engaging people on the frontline: bus operators and riders.

Our research seeks to inform and influence policy and practice and strives to create a just, safe, and efficient future for public transit, where technology complements and enhances human work rather than replaces it. By directly engaging with those who operate and use public transit, we aim to co-design systems that leverage technological advancements and prioritize human experience and societal well-being.

Through this project, we aim to:

Publications

  1. Hunter Akridge, Sarah Fox, Alice Xiaodi Tang, and Nikolas Martelaro. 2025. Health & Safety Sidelined: The Need For Effective And Non-Punitive Reporting Mechanisms In Transit Work. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.

  2. Alice Xiaodi Tang, Hunter Akridge, Nikolas Martelaro, and Sarah Fox. 2025. At the Breaking Point: How Bus Operators Cope with Transit Technology Failures and What That Can Tell Us About the Integration of Future Innovations. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS’25).

  3. Hunter Akridge, Alice Xiaodi Tang, Nikolas Martelaro, and Sarah Fox. 2025. Punctuated and Prolonged: A Workers’ Inquiry into Infrastructural Failures in Bus Transit. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW’25).

  4. Hunter Akridge, Bonnie Fan, Alice Xiaodi Tang, Chinar Mehta, Nikolas Martelaro, and Sarah Fox. 2024. “The bus is nothing without us”: Making Visible the Labor of Bus Operators amid the Ongoing Push Towards Transit Automation. In the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI. ACM, New York, NY, USA

  5. Nikolas Martelaro1, Sarah Fox1, Jodi Forlizzi, Raj Rajkumar, Christopher Hendrickson, and Stan Caldwell, How to Make Sense of Bus Transit Automation: Considerations for Policy Makers on the Future of Human-Automation Teaming in the Transit Workforce. Traffic21: A Transportation Research Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 2022. 1The first two authors contributed equally

Team

Contact

For inquiries about our research or to get involved, email codesigningtransit@andrew.cmu.edu

Acknowledgements

This research is generously supported by Traffic21, a transportation research institute at Carnegie Mellon University funded by the US Department of Transportation.

This research is in collaboration with the AFL-CIO Technology Institute, the Transport Workers Union of America, and the Amalgamated Transit Union.