SS ISTL undergraduate research assistant studies the connection between bike-share systems and public transit
By CSEE staff
Published July 6, 2026
Jacob “Koby” Carolan, a senior civil engineering major with a focus in urban planning and transportation at the University at Buffalo, is using transportation research to better understand how people move through urban environments.
Carolan, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was originally interested in pursuing a career in architecture. He was also interested in studying the inner workings of the built environment and found that civil engineering offered an ideal middle ground between structural design and problem-solving. His undergraduate studies have since shifted his focus toward engineering design, transportation, and human mobility.
During the summer of 2025, Carolan worked as a civil engineering intern for the Massachusetts Port Authority. There, he worked in the Capital Programs Division under the Design Technologies Integration Group, where he helped review and implement updated computer-aided design standards documentation and begin developing new specialized design standards.
Carolan now works in the Transportation Research and Visualization Laboratory (TRAVL), a marquee research facility within the Stephen Still Institute for Sustainable Transportation and Logistics. He and his student colleagues and faculty mentors in TRAVL are studying the relationship between New York City’s Citi bike-share system and the city’s expansive public transportation network.
More specifically, Carolan is investigating how the proximity of a bike-share station to a public transit stop affects bike-share route characteristics and whether those trips could be considered first-mile or last-mile excursions.
After graduating from UB in late 2026, Carolan hopes to transition into the planning and design side of public infrastructure development. Ideally, he wants to work on street, transit, or full neighborhood redevelopment projects that create transportation networks for a diverse range of users. His goal is to combine complete streets design, transportation engineering, and urban planning to help make communities safer for everyone.
