The Houston
Mobility
Games

Motivation and Problem Context

Understanding the mechanisms governing urban movement remains a central problem across transportation systems modeling and regional planning. While traditional travel behavior scholarship has long focused on characterizing how individuals navigate multimodal networks, translating empirical mobility records into actionable predictive models and public safety interventions poses distinct technical challenges. These challenges manifest across two critical domains:

1. Resolving travel mode choices from rich sociodemographic and spatial covariates, as these choices are closely related to Houstonians’ daily commutes and other activities undertaken to meet their needs, and relatedly
2. Isolating high-risk transportation corridors from observational collision data to formulate safety countermeasures.

We propose The Houston Mobility Games, a student competition designed to address these challenges through two complementary tracks. Rather than evaluating models in the abstract, this initiative bridges interpretable machine learning and evidence-based policy analysis by anchoring both tracks in localized, real-world data.

• Track A is a leaderboard-scored prediction contest: students predict how students at Houston-area campuses get to campus (i.e., which travel mode they use), and analyze which factors matter most in that that decision.
• Track B is a traffic safety analysis competition: students identify Houston's most dangerous corridors from crash records and propose countermeasures. Students may enter either or both.

Centennial Impact

As UH marks its centennial, the Houston Mobility Games brings together students across disciplines to address mobility and safety challenges affecting the university and the wider Houston region. Combining travel behavior research, predictive machine learning, and spatial analytics, the competition encourages students to connect technical findings with an understanding of people’s transportation needs.

Participants will gain experience in reproducible analysis, model interpretation, and translating evidence into recommendations for safer and more accessible transportation. Their findings could inform campus mobility planning and regional safety discussions, while selected projects could serve as teaching materials and starting points for future student research, extending the competition’s educational value beyond the centennial year.