ITS Berkeley

In this article, we describe how the travel experiences of residents of Barranquilla, Colombia have changed since a new bus rapid transit system was deployed in 2010 along with changes to pre-existing private transit services. We recruited interview participants using intercept methods at more than fifteen locations, conducted dozens of semi-structured interviews, and used collaborative and iterative coding to analyze the data. Interviewees expressed mixed feelings about the transition from private transit to the hybrid BRT-private transit system. Many were pleased about reductions in...

Do affordable housing projects in high-quality transit-oriented development areas reduce auto use? By how much? Under what conditions? These questions are complex but highly relevant for the state of California. Its Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities (AHSC) program estimates reductions in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) associated with project applications, and scores applications partly on this basis. Building on a large set of existing empirical literature, we carried out a new analysis of how the built environment affects travel in California. We relied on several data sources...

It is well understood that auto use is too high, and land uses are too spread out, due to market failures in transportation along with municipal restrictions on density that make residential choices suboptimal. Residential choices may also be suboptimal if households make irrational decisions when deciding where to live and how to get around—failing to account for time spent commuting, overvaluing privacy and material goods like housing, or undervaluing time spent on social activities. While such hypotheses have been identified in the behavioral psychology and experimental economics...

The objective of this paper is to examine whether new firms are more likely to form near rail transit stations. Two relatively new light-rail systems, one in Portland, Oregon and the other in Dallas, Texas form the basis of the analysis. A geo-coded time-series database of firm births from 1991 through 2008 is analyzed using all firm births, firm births of various sizes, and firm births of specific industry sectors. A random effects negative-binomial model is used to examine associations between proximity to rail stations and other spatially defined variables. Results show that newly...