Rail

Developing Operating Rules and Simulating Performance for One-dedicated-lane Bus Rapid Transit/Light Rail System

Tsao, H.-S Jacob
Dessouky, Yasser
Ingham, Kevin
Ongkowidjojo, Rocky
Tsao, Jason R.
2010

Caltrans has recently funded a project, through the Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) at San Jose State University, about geometric and performance feasibility of using virtually only one dedicated but dynamically reversible lane to provide two-way Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) or light-rail services at the same or similar service levels as those achievable with two dedicated lanes, along the median of a busy commute corridor with at-grade crossings and regular provision of left-turn lanes. This project extended that deterministic performance study in four complementary directions. We (i)...

San Joaquin Rail Corridor Crossing Survey

Greenhouse, Daniel
Christianson, Kent
Johnston, Scott
Kim, Zu
2008

In this project we have accomplished three goals. First, we have merged two existing, complementary databases in an effort to produce a single database that lists all the railroad crossings, and their known properties, in the San Joaquin Rail Corridor (SJRC). Second, we have demonstrated the practicality of using video data gathered from an existing Locomotive Video Data Acquistion System (LVDAS) to search for crossing violations in order to populate a database of crossing violations, which we term “near-misses”. By this means, crossings that are particularly susceptible to violations,...

Transportation Periodicals and Newsletters Currently Received at the Institute of Transportation Studies Library, University of California at Berkeley

Hernandez, Paul A.
2000

This publication is intended to serve as a convenient reference to selected transportation periodicals and newsletters currently (2000) received by UC Berkeley's Harmer E. Davis Transportation Li-brary. This latest version of Transportation Periodicals and Newsletters represents a thourough revision of earlier editions (1989, 1993, and 1995) published under the same (or similar) title. The subject content of this listing reflects the subject strengths of the H.E. Davis Transportation Library: highways and traffic, air transportation, railroads, and urban transit. Water and pipeline modes...

The Full Cost of Intercity Transportation - A Comparison of High Speed Rail, Air And Highway Transportation in California

Levinson, David
Gillen, David
Kanafani, Adib
Mathieu, Jean-michel
1996

The Full Cost of Intercity Transportation Page ES-1 This study evaluates the full cost of three modes of intercity transportation: air, highway, and high speed rail. The evaluation is done within the context of the California Corridor, connecting the Los Angeles Basin and the San Francisco Bay Area. The purpose of evaluating full cost is to compare the economic implications of investment in, or expansion of, any of these three modes. The scope of the analysis is full transportation cost. Full transportation costs includes external, or social cost, in addition to the internal costs of...

Applying Safety Treatments to Rail-Highway At-Grade Crossings

Cooper, Douglas L.
Ragland, David R.
2012

At-grade rail crossings provide different levels of warnings and/or barriers to alert drivers to the potential dangers presented by approaching trains. For some drivers, an activated warning system, rather than being a signal to stop, merely serves as a cue for the need to make a decision whether or not to cross. In California, for the ten-year period from 2001 to 2010, the result was 1,033 trainvehicle crashes resulting in 157 deaths and 458 injuries. The best solution to rail crossing crashes is to remove the need for the driver to engage in a potentially faulty decision-making process...

Rail + Property Development: A Model of Sustainable Transit Finance and Urbanism

Cervero, Robert
Murakami, Jin
2008

Hong Kong has aggressively pursued transit value capture to finance railway infrastructure through its “Rail + Property” development program, or R+P. More than half of all revenues received by the MTR Corporation, the owner-operator of Hong Kong’s largest railway network, come from property development. A wide variety of R+P projects presently exist in Hong Kong. Most focus on housing development though all have some degree of commercial development. Recent generation R+P projects have placed a stronger premium on urban design and quality of pedestrian environments. This has generally paid...

An Improvement on the End-of-Life of High-Speed Rail Rolling Stocks Considering CFRP Composite Material Replacement

Rungskunroch, Panrawee
Kaewunreuen, Sakdirat
Shen, Zuo-Jun
2019

It is undeniably true that transportation systems positively impact human life but, the use of transportation systems also emits green house gasses in the environment which leads to global warming. In this day and age, various technologies are being combined with transportation systems, aimed at reducing the global impact of greenhouse gas emissions. The high-speed rail (HSR), which is well-known for low CO2emissions, has continually been improved, especially its model. In this study, the material replacement method is taken to account for a feasibility study on the next model of the HSR....

TRANSOC Tours Train Box at Salesforce Transit Center

July 16, 2025

If you ask a group of people if they want to see a giant concrete box, you’ll get mixed enthusiasm. But for self-professed transportation nerds affiliated with the UC Berkeley Transportation Graduate Students Organizing Committee (TRANSOC), it was a learning experience punctuated with enthusiastic exclamations during a recent tour of the Train Box under the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.

“I was expecting a gigantic concrete box and I got a gigantic concrete box, and I think it's going to look incredible,” TRANSOC Co-President ...

Assessing Opportunities for Intelligent Transportation Systems in California's Passenger Intermodal Operations and Services

Miller, Mark A.
Loukakos, Dimitri
2001

This report presents the findings of its investigation into intermodal passenger transfer facilities' operations and services in urban areas of California and the opportunities for how the application of intelligent transportation systems may enhance such operations and services. The project was based initially on a macroscopic assessment of intermodal passenger transfer facility operations and services primarily by means of a review of the literature followed by a three-tier analysis through site visits, institutional aspects, and user views and opinions. Institutional aspects were...

Grade Crossing/Traffic Signal Optimization Study

We, Guoyuan
Li, Irene
Zhang, Wei-Bin
Johnston, Scott
Li, Meng
Zhou, Kun
2010

The second phase of this project further investigates impacts to local traffic operations at intersections adjacent to signal preemption by SPRINTER commuter trains and comes up with countermeasures that not only minimize such impacts but also take into account the traffic signal coordination. An extended traffic signal optimization model has been developed to minimize overall traffic delays and the weighted width of “green band” along several coordinated traffic signals around the grade crossings. Based on the train’s movement detection at grade crossings and the waiting queue estimation...