Searching for new ideas
COE IN BERKELEY
Host organisation:
Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Links:
The Centre's website
The western world’s transportation systems cannot be copied by developing countries because their conditions are too different. Researchers at VREF’s CoE in Berkeley are working on new ideas for sustainable transportation systems that suit conditions in both developing and developed countries.
We carry out experiments in real environments to test how a system can work in place,” says Carlos F. Daganzo, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the UC Berkeley Center. For example, experiments in Yokohama, Japan, have shown that more passengers would reach their destinations in a downtown area, with less delay and fewer emissions, if during the rush hour the number of vehicles simultaneously circulating in the downtown area were kept below a critical level.”
The Berkeley Centre aims both to understand effective policy making and to devise physical solutions to urban transportation problems. One example is an attempt to understand how different transportation modes can work together to benefit everyone. “We are now studying new designs for city streets and new ways of operating and placing traffic signals that should allow pedestrians, bicycles, buses and autos to coexist with minimal interference, improving everyone’s mobility and safety,” says Carlos F. Daganzo. Advances in information technology open the door for new urban transportation management policies that can simultaneously improve safety and mobility in all modes of urban transportation. “Our vision is to study the mutual interdependence of urban transportation policy and technology, and to use the understanding of that concept to devise sustainable transportation strategies for the world’s cities,” says Daganzo.
New modes of transportation
The Centre sees three primary and equally important users of its results: research institutes, universities and think tanks (such as the Tokyo Institute of Industrial Science) consulting firms; and government agencies that are directly responsible for transportation policy (such as the).
The Centre engages ten faculty members and many doctoral students from city planning, electrical engineering, and computer science. The research is built around five themes: Mobility & Accessibility, Adapting to Urban Form, Green Logistics, Congestion Mitigation and Wireless Infrastructure. Each doctoral student receives advice from several professors and exchanges ideas with a diverse group of fellow students, which is one way the Centre integrates its research themes. “One of our themes, Mobility & Accessibility, is about gaining a better understanding of the interaction between urban structure and the provision of mobility, including emerging transportation modes, to improve accessibility fairly and sustainably,” says Daganzo. For example, one of the Centre’s researchers has studied the impacts of electric mopeds – so called e-bikes – in Chinese cities. E-bikes are affordable, provide good mobility, and have low emissions per passenger kilometer. But one problem with e-bikes is that they use lead acid batteries, which can create high levels of lead pollution. “In addition, charging the batteries results in significant CO2 emissions if the energy used comes primarily from coal-fired power plants. This will be a growing problem for China, because e-bikes are getting more and more popular,” explains Daganzo.
Life-cycle cost analyses
The researchers have also developed a life cycle analysis method for comparing different transportation modes, such as cars, buses and rail. Factors such as energy consumption, greenhouse-gas emissions and emissions of other pollutants are included and combined in an analysis of the entire life cycle of a transportation system; e.g. taking into account choice of materials, design, production methods, productive life, disposal and the like. “Such analyses provide valuable information that is often overlooked when considering new transportation policies,” says Carlos F. Daganzo.
One of the Centre’s themes is about developing information technology to support the new ideas that the researchers are coming up with. For example, the Centre has developed open-source middleware that makes it possible to coordinate different traffic controllers in a city and make them compatible with each other – something that often isn’t possible without large costs associated with updating the entire system. “We have developed a robust and relatively inexpensive open source system that can be controlled and monitored over the internet. Many cities in developing countries experience compatibility problems with traffic control equipment. Robust and relatively inexpensive open source systems can be built using the middleware we developed. These systems can be easily controlled and monitored over the internet,” he says.
Sustainable transportation systems
One subject that the Centre has studied is how cities can better allow and plan for different types of users and modes of transportation. The researchers are exploring methods for monitoring and controlling downtown traffic. Another study illustrates that if some lanes on freeways are dedicated exclusively to cars with two or more passengers, the freeway as a whole can absorb more traffic. “We can use that knowledge to plan for a larger number of passengers and for additional modes of transportation, such as cars, buses, bicyclists and pedestrians, so that they can make better collective use of space,” says Carlos F. Daganzo.
The Centre is also studying how bus networks can be made more efficient and reliable. Getting people to choose buses as a mode of transportation requires, for example, that the buses keep to their schedules. Bus delays often lead to irritation and long waits for passengers. Then several buses on the same route arrive at the same time. “We are studying a system that relies on direct communication between bus drivers. The system should enable the buses to arrive at more evenly spaced intervals. That would, in turn, encourage people to choose buses instead of cars as their mode of travel,” says Carlos F. Daganzo.
