Land Use and Built Environment

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...

Shared Mobility Resources: Helping to Understand Emerging Shifts in Transportation

Shaheen, Susan
Cohen, Adam
Zohdy, Ismail
2018

Shared mobility is a transportation strategy that is rising in prominence and has thepotential to align with supportive land use, mobility, social, and environmental goals. As a concept, the term applies to any mode, whether bicycle, car, public transit, or other mode, in which shared use (concurrent or sequential) is often facilitated by smartphone apps and technology. Casual carpooling is one example in which sharing has been more organic and non-technological in nature. Given shared mobility’s notable growth and expansion in recent years, it merits a deeper understanding in light of its...

How Well Are Newly Sited K-12 Schools Incorporating Vehicle Miles Traveled Mitigation Measures?

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

In response to California law (SB 743, Chapter No. 386, Statutes of 2013), school districts are encouraged to use vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as criteria when evaluating the transportation impacts of new school construction, and identify feasible mitigation measures that eliminate or substantially reduce VMT generated by the new construction. To better understand the implications of this new law on school siting decisions, researchers at UC Berkeley analyzed 301 new schools constructed between 2008 and 2018 with respect to four VMT mitigation measures identified by the Governor’s Office...

Creating a Regional Program for Preserving Industrial Land: Perspectives from San Francisco Bay Area Cities

Roach, Emily
Chapple, Karen, PhD
2018

Industrial land plays a vital role in supporting the regional economy in the San Francisco Bay Area. It provides the operating space and support services for export sectors and other important local clusters, maintains linkages between businesses and sustains a local supply chain, provides diverse employment opportunities for people with a broad range of skills (including those with lower educational attainment), and supports a high share of middle-wage job opportunities. However, the Bay Area’s current inventory of industrial land (and associated jobs) is at risk due to increasing...

Multi-Lane Hybrid Traffic Flow Model: Quantifying the Impacts of Lane-Changing Maneuvers on Traffic Flow

Laval, Jorge A.
Daganzo, Carlos F.
2004

A multi-lane traffic flow model realistically captures the disruptive effects of lane- changing vehicles by recognizing their limited ability to accelerate. While they accelerate, these vehicles create voids in the traffic stream that affect its character. Bounded acceleration explains two features of freeway traffic streams: the capacity drop of freeway bottlenecks, and the quantitative relation between the discharge rate of moving bottlenecks and bottleneck speed. The model com- bines a multilane kinematic wave module for the traffic stream, with a detailed constrained-motion model to...

Inclusionary Zoning in a Monocentric City

Lehe, Lewis
2014

To show how inclusionary zoning alters development, the author finds the most profitable housing design to build on vacant lots at each location in a monocentric city under different regulatory regimes. Section 1 sets up the model by specifying renter's preferences, geography and building parameters. Section 2 solves the developer's profit-maximization problem at each location under each regime. Finally, in Section 3, a numerical simulation confirms the effects predicted by theory and gives a picture of their magnitude.

Some Properties of a Multi-Lane Extension of the Kinematic Wave Model

Laval, Jorge A.
2003

This paper extends an existing continuum multi-lane formulation for traffic flow, provides a discrete formulation for its numerical solution, and show initial results. The new formulation enables a natural treatment of boundary conditions such as merges, diverges, lane-drops and moving bottlenecks. The proposed model needs few extra parameters and is parsimonious. The look-ahead distance, for example, induces that non-local conditions affect the flow at any time-space point, causing smooth regime changes and fast waves. We find that as the look-ahead distance tends to zero, the solution...

Riding First Class: Impacts of Silicon Valley Shuttles on Commute & Residential Location Choice

Dai, Danielle
Weinzimmer, David
2014

Employer-provided private shuttles have become a prominent part of the transportation network between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. As the Bay Area plans for transportation investments to meet sustainability goals and accommodate future population and employment growth, an understanding of the role of regional commuter shuttles becomes increasingly important. This study investigates the impacts of private shuttles on commute mode and residential location choice by conducting a travel time comparison and surveying shuttle riders. The authors find that the provision of shuttles and...

What Can You Do with a County Road that You Can’t Afford to Maintain?

Jones, David
2017

Many rural county road networks were created at a time when funding was greater and rural populations were often larger than they are today. Eventually, surface treatments such as chip seals or thin asphalt were applied to many of these gravel roads to provide them with an all‐weather surface. These treated surfaces were also desirable because conventional gravel roads are dusty, often develop wash boarding quickly, and have high rates of gravel loss—which result in unsafe and uncomfortable conditions and greater damage to vehicles and crops. A solution to this problem is called ‘unpaving...

Spatio-temporal Road Charge: A Potential Remedy for Increasing Local Streets Congestion

Bayen, Alexandre
Forscher, Teddy
2017

US population. Additionally, the emergence of large ridesourcing or transportation network companies (TNCs) totaling up to tens of thousands of registered drivers in single cities (all using the same routing app), there is further consolidation. Across the US, this has led to new or increased congestion patterns that are progressively asphyxiating local streets due to so-called “cut-through traffic.” As neighborhoods have started to realize this, private citizens have begun to resist, by trying to sabotage or trick the apps, or shaming the through traffic through opinion articles, and news...