Public Transportation

Decline of Rail Transit Requires New Strategies

Rodriguez, D
Pike, S
McNally, M
Li, M
2024

During the pandemic, California’s four major rail systems— Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS), Sacramento Regional Transit (SacRT), and Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro)—experienced an average ridership decline of 72 percent between 2019 and 2021. BART had the greatest decrease (87 percent) and MTS the lowest (47 percent). However, ridership changes varied significantly across individual stations, with stations located in the central business district or at the end of lines having the highest ridership losses. Land...

Development and Performance Evaluation of AVCSS Deployment Sequences to Advance from Today's Driving Environment to Full Automation

Shladover, Steven
VanderWerf, Joel
Miller, Mark A.
Kourjanskaia, Natalia
Krishnan, Hariharan
2001

This report presents the findings of its investigation into deployment sequences to better understand the paths that could be taken from today's driving environment to vehicle-highway automation. One of the most vexing problems has always been that of determining how to advance from the present-day manually-controlled vehicles to the future fully automated vehicles. Considerable research attention has been devoted to defining the architecture and operating protocols, as well as the technology, of automated highway systems. Rather less attention has been devoted to defining the steps by...

Spatial and Temporal Utility Modeling to Increase Transit Ridership

Church, Richard L.
Noronha, Val
Lei, Ting
Corrigan, Wils
Burbidge, Shaunna
Marston, Jim
2005

The objective of this research project was to develop a better understanding of the possible alternatives that a large employment center, like the University of California at Santa Barbara, can adopt in order to better utilize transit, mitigate traffic, and reduce demand for on-site parking. Although this project was oriented to the UCSB campus, the techniques and approaches developed in this project were designed to be equally applicable elsewhere. There were three major elements of this project: 1) develop an understanding of commuting employees through the use of a survey, 2) identify...

Safety Analysis of Concept Systems for Guidance and Control of Transit Buses

Michael, James Bret
1997

This study reports on a method to accomplish sensor validation and fusion in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The method is based on probabilistic and fuzzy techniques that express a confidence in the sensor data and take into account environmental factors and the state of the system. Sensor data fusion uses the confidence assigned to each sensor reading and integrates them into one reading. Noise and failure are filtered from the data and lead to a safety improvement in ITS.

Evaluation of ITS Technology for Bus Transit Systems

Hall, Randolph
Dessouky, Maged
Zhang, Lei
Singh, Ajay
Patel, Vishal
1999

Recently, bus transit service providers have begun to adopt Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Mobile Data Terminals. These systems taken together have the potential to reduce the cost of providing transportation services through the execution of real-time control strategies, performance monitoring systems and data collection to support service realignment. We evaluate bus control strategies using ITS against those without ITS. Two levels of ITS are considered: (1) system with centralized tracking and (2) system with...

Personalized Demand-Responsive Transit Service

Cayford, Randall
Yim, Y. B. Youngbin
2004

Providing easy access to the public transit service is the goal of the California transit agencies. Many travelers cannot take an express transit because they often cannot park and ride. Smart DRT (demand responsive transit) Feeder is a system that collects transit riders from neighborhoods and takes them to transit stations. This system will use APTS (Advanced Public Transit System) technologies to make the feeder service convenient and reliable. The concept is very simple. When demand is high, Smart Feeder will use the fixed-route fixedschedule service. When demand is low, it will use...

A Planning Methodology For Intelligent Urban Transportation Systems

Kanafani, Adib
Khattak, Asad
Crotty, Melanie
Dahlgren, Joy
1992

This report deals with an introduction to the control aspect of platoon maneuvers in Automated Highway Systems. The different platoon maneuvers include lane changes, merge procedures and split procedures. The first part of the report consists of a review of the existing literature in this area. The survey is split up into the quasi-synchronous and vehicle follower controller methods of approach to the problem. The subsequent sections deal with the mathematical description of the problem with two representations of the system under study, varying only in level of model complexity. The...

Smart Parking Management Field Test: A Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District Parking Demonstration

Shaheen, Susan A., PhD
Rodier, Caroline, PhD
2006

Smart parking management technologies may provide a cost-effective tool to address near-term parking constraints at transit stations. Smart parking management systems have been implemented in numerous European, British, and Japanese cities to more efficiently use parking capacity at transit stations by providing real-time information via changeable message signs to motorists about available parking spaces in park-and-ride lots. This working paper describes the interim results of a smart parking field operational test, which operated at a San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District...

Development and Field Testing of An Interactive Transit Station Information System (ITSIS)Using Connected Vehicle Technologies

Meng, Huadong
Tsao, Jacob
Zhou, Kun
Picar, Justin
Mizuno, Bradley
Zhang, Wei-Bin
2018

The objective of Interactive Transit Station Information System (ITSIS) is to better inform transit travelers during their trips and to enable dynamic transit operations to better serve travelers. The ultimate goal is to make transit more friendly and attractive to the traveling population such that transit will become a viable choice for travel and an integrated part of the solution for congestion relief. This report documents a research effort to develop and test a ITSIS prototype that uses Connected Vehicle technologies to enable the real-time interaction between passengers and transit...

Advanced Public Transportation Sytems; A Taxonomy, Commercial Availability And Deployment, Phase II

Khattak, Asad
Et. al.
1997

This study explores the development and availability of Advanced Public Transportation Systems (APTS) technologies. The study refines a taxonomy of transit technologies and uses it to explore the availability of new technologies and their impacts in transit agencies. THe taxonomy is based on defining the features, functions and performance characteristics of transit technologies. Based on the taxonomy, three surveys of technology suppliers were conducted. Questions were related to technology features, functions, performance, implementation, and impacts.0