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Single occupancy vehicles are the most attractive transportation alternative for many commuters, leading to increased traffic congestion and air pollution. Advancements in information technologies create opportunities for smart solutions that incentivize ridesharing and mode shift to higher occupancy vehicles (HOVs) to achieve the car lighter vision of cities. In this study, we present HumanLight, a novel decentralized adaptive traffic signal control algorithm designed to optimize people throughput at intersections. Our proposed controller is founded on reinforcement learning with the...

The rising adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) leads to the alignment of their electricity and their mobility demands. Therefore, transportation and power infrastructures are becoming increasingly interdependent. In this work, we uncover patterns of PEV mobility by integrating for the first time two unique data sets: (i) mobile phone activity of 1.39 million Bay Area residents and (ii) charging activity of PEVs in 580,000 sessions obtained in the same region. We present a method to estimate individual mobility of PEV drivers at fine temporal and spatial resolution integrating...

Public electric vehicle (EV) chargers are unevenly distributed in California with respect to income, race and education-levels. This creates inequitable access to electric mobility especially for low-income communities of color, which. are less likely to have access to home charging stations. These vulnerable communities are also more likely to be located in areas with poor air quality and would therefore benefit from EV adoption. Currently programs exist in California that fund incentives for public EV chargers in “Disadvantaged Communities” but the process for identifying these...

A bottleneck with a diminished capacity is shown to have arisen on a freeway segment whenever queues from the segment's off-ramped spilled over and occupied its mandatory exit lane. It is also shown that longer exit queues from the over-saturate off-ramp were accompanied by lower discharge rates for non-exiting vehicles. The explanation appears to be rubber-necking on the part of the non-exiting drivers. Whenever the of-ramp queues were prevented from spilling over to the exit lane (by changing the logic of a nearby traffic signal), much higher flows were sustained on the freeway segment...