Rail

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...

Development of Deployment Strategy for an Integrated BRT System

Miller, Mark A.
Tan, Chin-Woo
Golub, Aaron
Hickman, Mark
Lau, Peter
Zhang, Wei-Bin
2006

BRT mixes the flexibility of traditional bus transit service with an array of higher performance rail transit features. One of its advantages over rail, however, is its possibility for incremental and flexible deployment. With this flexibility and incremental nature comes a deployment process for BRT that is highly complex because numerous elements can be incorporated in any number of distinct phases. In almost all BRT deployments, ITS and advanced bus technologies have been applied to BRT, however, in less than a fully integrated manner. This project explores how deployment decisions can...

Evaluation of Feasibility of UAV Technologies for Remote Surveying BART Rail Systems

2018

Routine inspection and monitoring of railway tracks and facilities is an important task to ensure operational safety. The existing standard manual and rail vehicle based investigation are substantially time consuming and inaccurate. UAV-based autonomous monitoring and inspection technology has shown great potential in many fields and industries but it has been rarely explored in railway transit systems. UC Berkeley California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technologies   (PATH) in partnership with Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) investigated  the application...

Analysis Toward Mitigation of Congestion and Conflicts at Light Rail Grade Crossings and Intersections

Li, Meng
Wu, Guoyuan
Johnston, Scott
Zhang, Wei-Bin
2009

Although many different railroad grade crossing control products are available, the most challenging limitation to traditional grade crossing systems is their inability to deliver consistent warning times in response to varying train speeds and station stops (particularly nearside stops). As a result, rail-roadway crossings often generate conflicts and congestion for motorist traffic and sometimes delay trains.By conducting system level analysis, this project will investigate the interactions and conflicts between urban/suburban rail and cross traffic. The information that is obtained will...

Evaluation of Truck and Bus Automation Scenarios: Operations Cost Analysis

Botha, Jan
Day, Jennifer E.
Adibhatla, Nagabhargavi
2004

Automated bus and truck systems hold the potential to improve road safety by eliminating some human error, increase the vehicle throughput by allowing vehicle convoying to shorten headways, and reduce costs associated with infrastructure, user time, and drivers. In this study, an automated bus system (ABUS) was compared with more-conventional light rail and bus-on-dedicated-lane (BDL) alternatives. A cost comparison (excluding accident costs) was also made among an automated freight trucking system (AHS-Truck), a no-build base condition, and configurations involving the addition of a...