Land Use and Built Environment

On July 1, 2010, the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) raised the tolls on the seven state‐ owned bridges in the San Francisco Bay Area. For six of the bridges, a flat $5 toll was implemented for passenger vehicles with a 50% discount ($2.50 toll) for peak‐period 3+ person carpools, which had previously crossed the bridges free of charge. On the San Francisco‐ Oakland Bay Bridge, a more complex toll structure was put into place. The toll was increased to $6 during weekday peak periods (5‐10 a.m. and 3‐7 p.m.), and the off‐peak weekday toll was left unchanged at $4;The peak period 3+ person...

An Adaptive Transit Signal Priority (ATSP) system is built upon and integrated with the existing Transit Automated Vehicle Location/Advanced communications system (AVL/ACS) to provide transit buses with needed priority by adaptively determining an optimum signal timing strategy based on status of both the concerned transit bus and the traffic conditions. PATH has conducted a series of studies on ATSP in collaboration with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and San Mateo County Transit District (SamTrans) since 2000, involving the development and implementation of a...

In light of chronic funding shortfalls and waxing highway construction and maintenance demands, public private partnerships (PPPs) (often though not always in conjunction with road pricing) have been garnering increasing attention from government officials in the U.S. and abroad. Despite many strongly-held opinions on PPPs – both pro and con – systematic evaluations of their efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and feasibility are all too rare.This paper is the first part of a research project that aims to rectify this shortage of careful, evenhanded, and rigorous analyses of PPPs by drawing...

Few studies have examined the relationship between micro-scale features of the built environment and street segment usage. Micro-scale features of the built environment include the width of the sidewalk, the presence of amenities such as benches and trash bins, and the presence of crossing aids such as stoplights and crosswalks. This study employs segment-level primary data collected for 338 street segments in close proximity to one of 71 bus rapid transit stations in Bogotá, Colombia. We also use secondary data to control for area-level characteristics such as density, socio-...