Economics and Finance

UC Berkeley has long been known as the home of important societal movements. In early October 2019, the electric aircraft movement came to UC Berkeley (UCB) courtesy of UCB’s Institute for Transportation Studies (ITS) and the College of Engineering. At what some have called the “Woodstock of Aviation”—the Sustainable Aviation Symposium (SAS) convened leaders of that movement from across the globe for two full days in UC’s Pauley Ballroom to explore how to solve important societal-enviro-economic issues in transportation with breakthroughs and innovations in high-tech physics, chemistry and...

This report explores how working families in seven major metropolitan regions (Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas–Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Baltimore–Washington) tradeoff housing and commuting costs, and how their tradeoffs differ from those of wealthier families. It is organized into five sections. Beyond this brief introduction, the report consists of five parts. Section 2 introduces the PUMS (Public Use Microdata Sample) database, upon which this analysis is based, and presents the procedures used to identify the seven case study metropolitan regions....

In August 2002, AC Transit began offering free bus passes to low-income middle and high school students. At the same time, the agency reduced the cost of its monthly youth pass from $27 to $15. This dramatic reduction in costs for student riders resulted from a grassroots advocacy campaign that successfully focused local political attention on school transportation in an area where school busing had largely been eliminated for middle school and high school students. The creation of the program drew together state and local elected officials, youth advocates, schools, and transportation...

Loading ships as they are unloaded (double-cycling) can improve the efficiency of a quay crane and thus container port. This paper describes the double-cycling problem, and presents two solution algorithms and simple formulae to estimate reductions in the number of operations, and operating time. The problem is formulated as a scheduling problem. Small problems can be solved to optimality with a standard numerical solver, but problems of typical size are computationally burdensome and terminated after 10 hours with optimality gaps larger than 50%. A formula for an improved lower bound to...