Standard travel models describe choices mainly through time and cost. In Indian cities people also weigh the air they breathe, the heat they walk through, and whether they trust the information in front of them. My work puts those trade-offs at the centre of transportation research.
I am a postdoctoral researcher in the HUMAN Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, working with Prof. Youngseo Kim. I study how people make travel decisions when the air is polluted, the day is hot or the information is new, and I build the methods and tools that turn this evidence into better routes, prices and policies.
My work moves from the street to the model to the decision. I collect field data, from on-road PM2.5 sensing to stated-preference experiments and a two-wave commuter panel; estimate it with hybrid choice models, interpretable machine learning and new estimation methods; and carry the results into tools people use. One of them, DRUM, a pollution-aware routing app, was featured in The Hindu and is the basis of a published Indian patent.
TransportationHow people choose modes, routes and times of travel
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EnvironmentAir pollution and heat exposure on the road
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AI & data scienceInterpretable, behaviourally grounded models from sparse data
Patent published. Our application on a personalised dynamic route planning system for sustainable urban mobility was published by the Indian Patent Office (No. 202631018379).
Career
Joined the HUMAN Lab at UCLA as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Youngseo Kim.
Career
Completed my Ph.D. at IIT Kharagpur. Thesis: Assessing impacts of perceived air pollution exposure on urban travel behaviour.
Review published in Transport Policy on how air-pollution exposure shapes travel behaviour, and a machine-learning study in the Decision Analytics Journal.
Award
Best Presentation Award, Research Scholar Day, RCGSIDM, IIT Kharagpur.
Grant
Travel grant to the 17th International Conference on Travel Behaviour Research (IATBR), Vienna.
2023
Award
Best Poster Presentation, Cyber-Physical Systems Summit (CyPhySS), IISc Bengaluru.
Presented at WCTR 2023, the 16th World Conference on Transport Research, Montréal.
03Research
From the street, to the model, to the decision.
I study travel trade-offs that standard models leave out, with data I collect in the field, estimate them with methods I develop, and carry the results into tools and policy.
01
Field data
On-road PM2.5 sensing across transport micro-environments
Stated-preference experiments and two-wave commuter panels
Convex estimation of nested and IPD logit models (PD‑MUSE)
Geostatistical deep learning; graphs with grounded LLMs
03
Decisions
DRUM routing app and a published patent
Pricing and allocating shade
Information design for EV charging
Evidence for clean-air and heat policy
Figure 1. How the work fits together. Air pollution, heat, electric mobility and road safety, in Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Kharagpur and tier-2 and tier-3 Indian cities.
Thrust 01
Travel under air pollution and heat
I measure what commuters inhale across transport micro-environments and how they perceive it. In a two-wave panel that followed the same 723 commuters in Kolkata from winter to summer, air quality carried about four times more weight in route choice in winter, and a pre-trip AQI alert was valued more than an equivalent cut in exposure. Hybrid latent class models separate commuters by how much exposure enters their decisions. I am extending this to heat: how people value shade, where a city should provide it, and how heat changes when and how people travel.
What travellers can do depends on what they know. I built DRUM, a routing engine that offers least-exposure and least-energy routes next to the shortest and fastest ones. In simulations for Central Delhi the least-exposure route cut exposure by half for 40% more travel time. DRUM was featured in The Hindu and is the basis of a published Indian patent. Related work studies how information about public chargers shapes choice, reliability and trust in EV charging, and how to encourage cycling to suburban rail.
I develop methods that keep the structure of choice models while using what machine learning does well. PD‑MUSE estimates nested logit and related models by solving a convex problem and a small search, instead of one hard non-concave problem. Other work joins econometric theory with deep learning for mode-choice prediction, estimates air quality from sparse sensor networks, and audits whether a single traffic image, read through a heterogeneous graph and a grounded LLM, can support conflict screening in mixed Indian traffic.
@misc{meena2026patent,
title = {Personalised dynamic route planning system for sustainable urban mobility},
author = {Meena, K. K. and Goswami, A. K.},
howpublished = {Indian Patent Application No. 202631018379},
year = {2026},
note = {Published 31 July 2026}
}
@article{meena2026travellers,
title = {Not all travellers think alike: Segmenting travel behaviour under air pollution exposure using a hybrid latent class and discrete choice approach},
author = {Meena, K. K. and Goswami, A. K.},
journal = {Transportation Research Record},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1177/03611981261429472}
}
@article{meena2025dynamic,
title = {Dynamic route planning for urban green mobility: Development of a web application offering sustainable route options to commuters},
author = {Meena, K. K. and Singh, A. K. and Goswami, A. K.},
journal = {Transportation Research Record},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1177/03611981251331011}
}
@article{sumbhate2025school,
title = {Assessing air pollution exposure to school children in different modes of transport while commuting to school: A case of {Kharagpur}, {India}},
author = {Sumbhate, A. and Meena, K. K. and Goswami, A. K.},
journal = {Journal of the Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies},
volume = {16},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.11175/easts.16.PP3879}
}
@article{manoj2025bicycle,
title = {Modeling bicycle choice behavior and its potential health impact: Case of first/last mile access to suburban rail},
author = {Manoj, B. S. and Meena, K. K. and Panchal, H. and Sharma, G. and Goswami, A. K.},
journal = {International Journal of Sustainable Transportation},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1080/15568318.2025.2572818}
}
@article{manoj2025tod,
title = {A prioritization framework to identify key attributes of transit-oriented development ({TOD}) using a multi-criteria decision-making ({MCDM}) approach: An {Indian} context},
author = {Manoj, B. S. and Meena, K. K. and Goswami, A. K.},
journal = {Sustainable Transport and Livability},
volume = {2},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1080/29941849.2025.2516475}
}
@article{meena2024review,
title = {A review of air pollution exposure impacts on travel behaviour and way forward},
author = {Meena, K. K. and Goswami, A. K.},
journal = {Transport Policy},
volume = {154},
pages = {48--60},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1016/j.tranpol.2024.05.024}
}
@article{meena2024machine,
title = {A machine learning approach for unraveling the influence of air quality awareness on travel behavior},
author = {Meena, K. K. and Bairwa, D. and Agarwal, A.},
journal = {Decision Analytics Journal},
volume = {11},
pages = {100459},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1016/j.dajour.2024.100459}
}
@article{meena2023perception,
title = {Perception of commuters towards air quality in {Delhi}},
author = {Meena, K. K. and Singh, V. and Agarwal, A.},
journal = {Journal of Transport \& Health},
volume = {31},
pages = {101643},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1016/j.jth.2023.101643}
}
@article{singh2021travellers,
title = {Travellers' exposure to air pollution: A systematic review and future directions},
author = {Singh, V. and Meena, K. K. and Agarwal, A.},
journal = {Urban Climate},
volume = {38},
pages = {100901},
year = {2021},
doi = {10.1016/j.uclim.2021.100901}
}
Manuscripts under review6
TR-DSecond revisionR6
How charging information shapes choice, reliability, and trust in public EV charging
K. K. Meena, S. V. Sesidhar
Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment
How information about public chargers affects which one drivers choose, and how reliable and trustworthy they find the network.
@inproceedings{gupta2026hybrid,
title = {A hybrid geostatistical and deep learning framework for urban pollutant concentration prediction from sparse data},
author = {Gupta, C. and Amitabh, A. and Meena, K. K. and Goswami, A. K.},
booktitle = {18th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS)},
publisher = {IEEE},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1109/COMSNETS67989.2026.11418296}
}
@inproceedings{joshi2026geonbeats,
title = {{GeoNBeats}: Unified spatio-temporal neural basis expansion for air quality estimation in sparse sensor networks},
author = {Joshi, V. and Meena, K. K. and Goswami, A. K.},
booktitle = {IEEE International Conference on AI Engineering and Innovation (AIEI)},
publisher = {IEEE},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1109/AIEI69164.2026.11496657}
}
C13
Developing an integrated walkability score using image-based feature extraction and user preferences
A. Singh, K. K. Meena, G. Sharma, A. K. Goswami, S. Mishra
TRB 2026105th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC; also accepted at WCTR 2026, France
@inproceedings{meena2024impact,
title = {Impact of air pollution on informed decision-making for choice of a travel mode},
author = {Meena, K. K. and Taneja, R. and Agarwal, A.},
booktitle = {16th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS)},
pages = {189--194},
publisher = {IEEE},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1109/COMSNETS59351.2024.10427003}
}
C6
Breathable modes to school: Assessing the air pollution exposure of travel choices for school children in urban environments
Pollution-aware route planning for commuters: five routes from live air-quality and traffic data, including the least-exposure and least-energy options. The basis of the published patent and of a TRR paper.
HUMAN Lab, University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA
With Prof. Youngseo Kim. Structured discrete choice estimation (PD-MUSE, manuscript in preparation); heat, exposure and daily activity and travel (HEAT).
RCG School of Infrastructure Design and Management. Advisor: Prof. Arkopal Kishore Goswami. Thesis: Assessing impacts of perceived air pollution exposure on urban travel behaviour.
2023Best Poster PresentationCyber-Physical Systems Summit (CyPhySS), IISc Bengaluru
2019 – 2026MHRD FellowshipMinistry of Education, Government of India
2019GATE Civil Engineering, All India Rank 559Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering
SchoolRegional winner, National Children’s Science CongressDepartment of Science & Technology, Government of India
08Teaching & talks
Sharing what the data say.
Teaching
Core courses in transportation engineering, traffic engineering and transportation planning; electives in travel demand and discrete choice analysis, transportation data analytics and machine learning, and transport, environment and health.
NPTELMultimodal Urban Transport
CEN 662Intersection Design
CE13001Engineering Drawing
Teaching Assistant at IIT Kharagpur and IIT Roorkee, 2019–2025: laboratory sessions, simulation tools and geospatial analysis.
Invited talks
2025
DRUM: pollution-aware dynamic routing for urban mobilityGoogle India
2022
Transportation data analysis using real-world mobility dataNIT Calicut
2022
Data visualisation and decision support using TableauSwastik Edustart
2020
Quality control and performance evaluation of road infrastructureIIT Roorkee
2019
Practical aspects of concrete mix design and quality assuranceWonder Cement Ltd.
09Service & toolkit
Giving back, and getting it done.
Reviewer for 8 journals
Transport Policy
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice
Transportation Research Record
Travel Behaviour and Society
Journal of Transport & Health
Research in Transportation Business & Management
Expert Systems with Applications
PLOS Climate
Roles
2025Technical Session Chair, EASTS Conference, Jakarta
2023, 2024Overall Coordinator, Annual Conference on Infrastructure (IBSR), IIT Kharagpur
2022 – 2023Departmental Social Media Head, IIT Kharagpur
2020 – 2021Placement Representative, IIT Roorkee
Member
ASCE Transportation & Development Institute · Transportation Research Group of India · World Conference on Transport Research Society · International Association for Travel Behaviour Research
Modelling
Hybrid latent class
ICLV
Mixed logit
Nested & IPD logit
Panel econometrics
Stated-preference design
Willingness-to-pay
MCDM
Learning
Deep learning
Interpretable ML
Geostatistics & kriging
LSTM & Prophet
Computer vision for the built environment
Convex optimisation
Software
Python
R
JavaScript
React
Node.js
SQL
MongoDB
Git
LaTeX
NLOGIT
SPSS
VISSIM
QGIS
Tableau
D3.js
Fieldwork
Low-cost sensor deployment
On-road exposure measurement by mode
Two-wave panel survey administration
10Contact
Let’s make travel cleaner, cooler and fairer.
I’m always happy to talk about collaborations, datasets, invited talks or the next question worth asking. The quickest way to reach me is email.
