Infrastructure

Creating an Inclusive Bicycle Level of Service: Virtual Bicycle Simulator Study

Julia Griswold
Aguilar, Edna
Wang, Han
Miah, Md Mintu
2025

Bicycle level of service (BLOS) is an essential performance measure for transportation agencies to monitor and prioritize improvements to infrastructure, but existing measures do not capture the nuance of facility differences on the state highway system. However, with the advancements in virtual reality (VR) technology, a VR bicycle simulator is an ideal tool to safely gather user feedback on a variety of bicycling environments and conditions. This research explored the benefits and limitations of using a VR environment to assess individuals’ bike infrastructure preferences. We conducted a...

Planning for Electric Vehicles Coupled with Urban Mobility

Xu, Yanyan
Çolak, Serdar
Kara, Emre C.
Scott Moura
Marta Gonzalez
2018

The rising adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) leads to the alignment of their electricity and their mobility demands. Therefore, transportation and power infrastructures are becoming increasingly interdependent. In this work, we uncover patterns of PEV mobility by integrating for the first time two unique data sets: (i) mobile phone activity of 1.39 million Bay Area residents and (ii) charging activity of PEVs in 580,000 sessions obtained in the same region. We present a method to estimate individual mobility of PEV drivers at fine temporal and spatial resolution integrating...

Coupling Natural Hazard Estimates with Road Network Analysis to Assess Vulnerability and Risk: Case Study of Freetown (Sierra Leone)

Nelson, Andrew
Lindbergh, Sarah
Stephenson, Lucy
Halpern, Jeremy
Arroyo, Fatima Arroyo
Espinet, Xavier
Marta Gonzalez
2019

Many of the world’s most disaster-prone cities are also the most difficult to model and plan. Their high vulnerability to natural hazards is often defined by low levels of economic resources, data scarcity, and limited professional expertise. As the frequency and severity of natural disasters threaten to increase with climate change, and as cities sprawl and densify in hazardous areas, better decision-making tools are needed to mitigate the effects of near- and long-term extreme events. We use mostly public data from landslide and flooding events in 2017 in Freetown, Sierra Leone to...

A Data Science Framework for Planning the Growth of Bicycle Infrastructures

Olmos, Luis E.
Tadeo, Maria Sol
Vlachogiannis, Dimitris
Alhasoun, Fahad
Espinet Alegre, Xavier
Ochoa, Catalina
Targa, Felipe
Marta Gonzalez
2020

Cities around the world are turning to non-motorized transport alternatives to help solve congestion and pollution issues. This paradigm shift demands on new infrastructure that serves and boosts local cycling rates. This creates the need for novel data sources, tools, and methods that allow us to identify and prioritize locations where to intervene via properly planned cycling infrastructure. Here, we define potential demand as the total trips of the population that could be supported by bicycle paths. To that end, we use information from a phone-based travel demand and the trip distance...

The Dark Side of the Earth: Benchmarking Lighting Access for All Cities on Earth and the CityNet dataset

Albert, Adrian
Strano, Emanuele
Kaur, Jasleen
Marta Gonzalez
2021

In this paper, we present an analysis of urban form, defined as the spatial distribution of macroeconomic quantities that characterize a city such as population, built environmentBuilt environment, and energy useEnergy use. In particular, we develop a framework to study the question of “mismatch” between the spatial distribution of lighting levels observed in a city (which was previously shown to be a proxy for energy access and wealth levels) and that city’s population density and built area distribution. This allows us to rank cities globally by their ability to, intuitively, “match...

Towards Resilient Critical Infrastructures: Understanding the Impact of Coastal Flooding on the Fuel Transportation Network in the San Francisco Bay

He, Yiyi
Lindbergh, Sarah
Ju, Yang
Marta Gonzalez
Radke, John
2021

Sea level rise (SLR) and storm surge inundation are major concerns along the coast of the San Francisco Bay (the Bay Area), impacting both coastal communities and critical infrastructure networks. The oil industry comprises a complex and critical infrastructure network located in the Bay Area. There is an urgent need to assess consequences and identify risk-based solutions to increase the resilience of this industrial network in the Bay Area to SLR and storm surge. In this study, a comprehensive multi-modal network model representing the fuel supply system was built. A total of 120 coastal...

Cities as Complex Systems—Collection Overview

Rybski, Diego
Marta Gonzalez
2022

This collection provides a contemporary excerpt of “Cities as complex systems”. The contributions have been submitted between April and October 2020. We briefly discuss example papers addressing the themes “urban scaling”, “urban mobility”, “flows in cities”, “spatial analysis”, “information technology and cities”, and “cities in time”. After motivating the intersection of cities and complexity, we provide an introduction and additional thoughts on urban scaling.

EEZ Mobility: A Toolf or Modeling Equitable Installation of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

Clark, Callie
Ozturk, Ayse Tugba
Hong, Preston
Marta Gonzalez
Scott Moura
2022

Public electric vehicle (EV) chargers are unevenly distributed in California with respect to income, race and education-levels. This creates inequitable access to electric mobility especially for low-income communities of color, which. are less likely to have access to home charging stations. These vulnerable communities are also more likely to be located in areas with poor air quality and would therefore benefit from EV adoption. Currently programs exist in California that fund incentives for public EV chargers in “Disadvantaged Communities” but the process for identifying these...

Sidewalk Networks: Review and Outlook

Rhoads, Daniel
Rames, Clément
Solé-Ribalta, Albert
Marta Gonzalez
Szell, Michael
Borge-Holthoefer, Javier
2023

From a transport perspective, increasing active travel –and walking in particular– is crucial for the future of sustainable cities, as reflected in global decarbonisation policies and agendas. Further, walking is much more than a mere mode of transport: it provides a fundamental social function, fostering vibrant cohesive communities. Arguably, walking and its associated infrastructure –sidewalks– should rank among the highest priorities for planning authorities. However, efficiency- and speed-driven urbanisation has gradually reallocated street space to private cars, leading to...

Dimension Reduction Approach for Understanding Resource-flow Resilience to Climate Change

Salgado, Ariel
He, Yiyi
Radke, John
Ganguly, Auroop Ratan
Marta Gonzalez
2024

Networked dynamics are essential for assessing the resilience of lifeline infrastructures. The dimension-reduction approach was designed as an efficient way to map the high-dimensional dynamics to a low-dimensional representation capturing system-level behavior while taking into consideration network structure. However, its application to socio-technical systems has not been considered yet. Here, we extend the dimension-reduction approach to resource-flow dynamics in multiplex networks. We apply it to the San Francisco fuel transportation network, considering the flow between refineries,...