ITS Berkeley

A Dozen Reasons for Raising Gasoline Taxes

Wachs, Martin
2003

Motor fuel taxes at state and federal levels have traditionally been earmarked for transportation investments, supporting road construction, maintenance, and operations, and increasingly public transit. Recently, elected officials have been reluctant to raise fuel taxes despite increases in the cost of transportation programs. Other forms of support, especially borrowing and local sales taxes are playing larger roles in transportation finance. Raising fuel taxes would be more effective, efficient and equitable than the alternatives that are increasingly more popular.

Integrating Traffic Network Analysis and Communication Network Analysis at a Regional Scale to Support More Efficient Evacuation in Response to a Wildfire Event

Soga, Kenichi
Comfort, Louise
Zhao, Bingyu
Lorusso, Paola
Soysal, Sena
2021

As demonstrated by the Camp Fire evacuation, communications (city-to-city, city-to-residents) play important roles in coordinating traffic operations and safeguarding region-wide evacuation processes in wildfire events. This collaborative report across multiple domains (fire, communication and traffic), documents a series of simulations and findings of the wildfire evacuation process for resource-strapped towns in Northern California. It consists of: (1) meteorological and vegetation-status dependent fire spread simulation (cellular automata model); (2) agency-level and agency-to-residents...

Vehicle Manufacturing Futures in Transportation Life-cycle Assessment

Chester, Mikhail
Horvath, Arpad
2011

Vehicle manufacturing effects are critical life-cycle components in the total costs of vehicle travel and future manufacturing processes should be evaluated for travel forecasts. With efforts to introduce lightweight materials, increased fuel economy, and new technologies such as electric vehicles, understanding the energy and environmental effects of these expected vehicles is critical. Current vehicle manufacturing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions are summarized from existing research for passenger (conventional gasoline vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles, aircraft, high-speed...

Geometry of Vanishing Points and its Application to External Calibration and Realtime Pose Estimation

Kim, ZuWhan
2006

Vanishing points of an image contain important information for camera calibration. Various calibration techniques have been introduced using the properties of vanishing points to find intrinsic and extrinsic calibration parameters. This paper revisits the vanishing points geometry and suggests a simple extrinsic parameter estimation algorithm which uses a single rectangle. The comparison with the Camera Calibration Toolbox for Matlab ® shows that the proposed algorithm is highly competitive. The suggested technique is also applied to a realtime pose estimation for an unmanned air vehicle’s...

Mobile Device Data Analytics for Next-Generation Traffic Management

Macfarlane, Jane, PhD
Patire, Anthony, PhD
Deodhar, Kanaad
Laurence, Colin
2021

Quality data is critically important for research and policy-making. The availability of device location data carrying rich, detailed information on travel patterns has increased significantly in recent years with the proliferation of personal GPSenabled mobile devices and fleet transponders. However, in its raw form, location data can be inaccurate and contain embedded biases that can skew analyses. This report describes the development of a method to process, clean, and enrich location data. Researchers developed a computational framework for processing large scale location datasets....

Background Paper: The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) Makes Trip-Planning Easier — Especially During a Pandemic — Yet its Use by California Agencies is Uneven

Frick, Karen Trapenberg, PhD
Kumar, Tanu, PhD
Post, Alison, PhD
2020

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is an open source data format public transportation agency use to share information about routes and vehicle arrival and departure times. A variety of trip-planning applications, including Google Maps, rely on GTFS feeds to incorporate public transit information. In April 2020, the California Integrated Travel Project conducted a Feasibility Study that called for the widespread adoption of GTFS-static (GTFS-s) and GTFS-realtime (GTFS-r) to make transit simpler for California residents; however, there is little research on patterns of...

How Well Do New K-12 Public School Sites in California Incorporate Mitigation Measures Known to Reduce Vehicle Miles Traveled?

Vincent, Jeffrey M., PhD
Maves, Sydney
Thompson, Amy
2022

California law (SB 743) requires school districts to measure the impact of school construction on the production of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and identify feasible mitigation measures that eliminate or substantially reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) generated. This study analyzes 301 new schools constructed between 2008-2018 with respect to four VMT mitigation measures identified by the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) known to minimize VMT (proximity to high quality transit areas, proximity to roads with bicycle facilities, walkability scores, and...

Summary of Interviews with California Metropolitan Planning Organizations About Senate Bill 375 and the Sustainable Communities Strategies

Amini, Jazmin
Kerchof, Clay
Mathews, Laurel
Thompson, Mathew
2021

In July and August of 2020, a research team of four graduate students from UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning conducted interviews with directors and other high-level staff representing several of California’s metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to gather information on the achievements and challenges associated with the implementation of SB 375. Key takeaways from this effort include: 1) MPOs are not requesting additional authorities or oversight of local land use decisions; 2) MPOs use funding as “carrots” to incentivize local plans to align with regional goals...

Current State of the Sharing Economy and Evacuations: Lessons from California

Wong, Stephen
Shaheen, Susan, PhD
2019

In many evacuations including wildfire evacuations, public agencies often do not have enough resources to evacuate and shelter all citizens. Consequently, we propose that the sharing economy, through private companies and/or private citizens, could be leveraged in disasters for transportation and sheltering resources. To assess this feasibility, we distributed surveys to individuals impacted by three major wildfires in California: 1) the 2017 October Northern California Wildfires (n=79), 2) the 2017 December Southern California Wildfires (n=226), and 3) the 2018 Carr Wildfire (n=284)....

Future of Public Transit and Shared Mobility: Scenario Planning for COVID-19 Recovery

Shaheen, Susan, PhD
Wong, Stephen, PhD
2021

In 2020, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic enveloped the world, leading to a public health crisis that profoundly changed all aspects of society, especially multiple sectors in transportation such as public transit and shared mobility. With so much uncertainty about the future of travel, the transportation sector needs to move rapidly to shape the nature of public transit and shared mobility services during the COVID-19 recovery period. Consequently, the University of California Institute of Transportation Studies (UC ITS) and the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) Executive...