Transportation Minor

Transportation systems continue to be the main driving force behind the ongoing race toward building smart cities of tomorrow. In fact, transportation systems are being re-invented, re-engineered, and revolutionized at a rate that has never been seen in history except for the time motorized transportation replaced horse and buggy approximately 100 years ago. The purpose of the Civil and Urban Engineering undergraduate minor in Transportation is to open new avenues for NYU’s undergraduate students from all disciplines to be involved in these exciting developments in transportation engineering and planning. The main educational goal is to provide students with the necessary foundations to use advanced analytical techniques and to employ emerging publicly available big data sources not only to analyze and evaluate existing transportation systems but also to plan and engineer future systems such as hyperloop and autonomous vehicles.

Students will have the opportunity to learn to use advanced simulation and spatial data analysis and visualization tools to assess the effects of implementing alternative designs of these emerging transportation systems. The capstone course will be the culminating experience to work on exciting real-world projects with leading industry and agency partners under the guidance of transportation faculty with a wealth of academic and practical experience in transportation engineering and planning. Students involved in this minor will also have the opportunity to work on exciting research projects led by the newly established USDOT Tier 1 University Transportation Center, C2SMART. Students are required to take a total of five classes.

The minor is open to undergraduate students. Transportation is a multidisciplinary field and undergraduates from other engineering departments, computer science, and urban planners are all welcome to participate in this minor.

Learning Objectives of the Transportation Minor:

• Learn urban transportation planning principles.
• Develop foundational skills for evaluating transportation facilities and systems.
• Enhance data-driven problem-solving capabilities and analytical reasoning skills.
• Understand how new technologies can be applied to addressing urban transportation challenges

Graduates are expected to pursue careers in traffic engineering, transportation planning, highway engineering, transportation systems modeling, public transit operations and planning, design of Intelligent Transportation Systems, or mobility data sciences. Example careers include highway development for the World Bank; designing multi-million dollar transit systems in New York for the MTA; creating traffic simulations to help coastal cities plan evacuation scenarios to prepare against hurricanes; developing data models for companies like Amazon, Google, or Via to transport people and goods across major metropolitan areas; or testing new emerging technologies like automated vehicles, smart grid, or drone monitoring systems for city agencies and mobility providers. Our graduates are prepared so that they can choose to embark on higher education to become transportation and mobility specialists in an emerging smart cities era. Example careers on Linkedin.

Sample Course Scenarios

Example Roadmap for CUE student interested in traffic:

• Year 2: CE-UY 2343 Transportation Engineering (required for CUE)
• Year 2: CE-UY 3303 Traffic Engineering
• Year 3: CE-UY 3333 Transportation Systems and Software
• Year 4: CE-UY 4393 Analytics and Learning Methods for Smart Cities (after taking CE-UY 2013 Computing in CUE)
• Year 4: CE-UY 4822 Civil Engineering Design II

Example Roadmap for CUE student interested in public transit:

• Year 2: CE-UY 2343 Transportation Engineering (required for CUE)
• Year 2: CE-UY 3363 Transportation Economics
• Year 3: CE-UY 3373 Transportation Systems Analytics (after taking MA-UY 2224 Data Analysis)
• Year 4: MG-UY 4204 Management Science or CE-UY 4043 Sustainable Cities
• Year 4: CE-UY 4822 Civil Engineering Design II

Example Roadmap for a non-CUE student interested in transportation policy analysis with a probability/stats pre-requisite:

• Year 2: CE-UY 2343 Transportation Engineering
• Year 2: CE-UY 3363 Transportation Economics
• Year 3: CE-UY 3373 Transportation Systems Analytics (after taking probability/stats pre-req)
• Year 4: A course from their major (if related) or one of the other electives (PADM-GP 4114 Surveys and Interviews if allowed)
• Year 4: CE-UY 4822 Civil Engineering Design II

Example Roadmap for a non-CUE student interested in emerging mobility technologies with a probability/stats and computing pre-requisite:

• Year 2: CE-UY 2343 Transportation Engineering
• Year 3: CE-UY 3373 Transportation Systems Analytics (after taking probability/stats pre-req)
• Year 3: A course from their major (if related) or one of the other electives (e.g. MATH-UA 0144 Introduction to Computer Simulation)
• Year 4: CE-UY 4393 Analytics and Learning Methods for Smart Cities (after taking computing pre-req)
• Year 4: CE-UY 4822 Civil Engineering Design II

Transportation Minor Advisor: Each student participating in this minor is assigned a transportation faculty member within the CUE department as a minor advisor. The advisor will meet with the student at least once per semester. 

Departmental Advisor: Joseph Chow

joseph.chow@nyu.edu