Modeling

Climate change is rapidly becoming known as a tangible issue that must be addressed to avoid major environmental consequences in the future. Recent change in public opinion has been caused by the physical signs of climate change–melting glaciers, rising sea levels, more severe storm and drought events, and hotter average global temperatures annually. Transportation is a major contributor of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activity, accounting for approximately 14 percent of total anthropogenic emissions globally and about 27 percent in the U.S....

Understanding the key factors influencing policy perception can be critical for informing the design of public policies. Feebates is a unique public policy that is meant to influence vehicle purchases. It presents buyers with a rebate for purchasing low-emission vehicles and a fee for purchasing high-emission vehicles. Because feebates directly impacts the consumer, understanding the dynamics of public perception, support, and opposition is important. This study explores the public perception of a potential feebate policy within California, and evaluates the robustness of an ordinal...

Shared automated vehicle (SAV) ridehailing services are now operating in several metropolitan regions in the United States. While providing benefits, SAV services may exacerbate issues related to curb usage and vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) in urban areas. The objective of this study is to provide guidance to cities by evaluating the impacts of SAVs’ short-term curb usage for staging between serving ride requests, under different curb restrictions and SAV operational strategies. We focus on the following performance metrics: VKT, curb productivity, customer wait time, and customer...

Due the pace and the scale of urban development in China, the implementation of sustainable urban practices there is an essential step in addressing climate change. Chinese officials are becoming increasingly interested in sustainable practices including transit-oriented development (TOD). However, even though the concept of TOD is supported, implementation sometimes falls short of desirable outcomes. In this paper, we present the preliminary results from a collaborative project carried out with planning officials from the city of Jinan (pop. 3.4 million), for a 3.1 km2 (1.15 mi2) district...