Planning

Assembly Bill (AB) 285 (Friedman, 2019) requires the California Strategic Growth Council (SGC) to submit a report to the Legislature by January 31, 2022, that includes the following:An overview of the California Transportation Plan (CTP). An overview of all regional Sustainable Communities Strategies (SCS) and any alternative planning strategies, as needed. An assessment of how the implementation of the CTP and regional plans “will influence the configuration of the statewide integrated multimodal transportation system.”  A “review of the potential impacts and opportunities for...

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...

Thirty years ago scholars first presented convincing evidence that local officials use biased travel demand forecasts to justify decisions based on unstated considerations. Since then, a number of researchers have demonstrated convincingly that such forecasts are systematically optimistic-often wildly so-for reasons that cannot be explained solely by the inherent difficulty of predicting the future. Why do modelers-professional engineers and planners who use quantitative techniques to predict future demand for travel and estimate its potential impact on built and proposed transportation...

This document is based on a set of lecture notes prepared in 2007-2010 for a University of California, Berkeley graduate course, Public Transportation Systems, a course targeted to first year graduate students with diverse academic backgrounds. Systems are examined in order of increased complexity so that generic insights evident in simple systems can be put to use as knowledge building blocks for the study of more complex systems. The document is organized in eight modules: five on planning (general, shuttle systems, corridors, two dimensional systems, and unconventional transit); two on...