Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley

The use of airport gate electrification infrastructure in the form of ground power (GP) and preconditioned air (PCA) systems can reduce energy and maintenance costs, emissions, and health risks by limiting the use of aircraft auxiliary power unit (APU) engines at the gate. However, their benefits can only be gained when they are actually being used; otherwise, pilots keep APUs on to fulfill their aircraft’s demands for electrical power and air conditioning. GP and PCA systems require a large initial infrastructure investment to increase energy efficiency, and they are installed with the assumption that they will be highly utilized. In this report, a method is developed to examine how much and why GP and PCA are not used to their full potential when they are readily available.

Sidewalks and crosswalks serve little purpose for pedestrians if they are routinely obstructed by automobiles. In New York City, local journalists and transportation advocates have drawn attention to this occurring, particularly in certain settings.  Specifically, there is consistent photographic evidence that streets surrounding New York Police Department (hereafter, NYPD) offices are replete with cars parked on the sidewalk and within crosswalks. Though clearly problematic for pedestrians and abutting residents and local businesses, this type of parking behavior has not been studied systematically–both in terms of its  geographic extent, and how long it has occurred. This paper considers the intersection of two issues –parking and public-employee behavior –both of which have been considered at length by scholars separately. As to the former, there have been a number of studies documenting drivers parking in ways that violate established regulations. Indeed, drivers often avoid paying at parking meters (Petiot 2001), park on residential sidewalks (Shoup 2014), and in bike lanes (Moran 2020). It is perhaps not surprising that drivers behave in such ways, given so often there are few penalties for doing so. However, evidence that speeding and red-light cameras can reduce dangerous driving (Wilson et al. 2010; Graham et al. 2019; Bhat and Martinez 2022), indicate that increased enforcement could also decrease parking that obstructs pedestrian infrastructure.

This Preliminary Investigation document, on one hand, outlines challenges encountered by SB/DBEs in the process of getting certified, entering into a contract, executing on projects or delivering services, and sustaining or growing their business. On the other hand, it summarizes OCR’s current ongoing efforts that are aiming to expand contracting with SB/DBEs. Along the way it identifies opportunities that warrant more in-depth investigation for OCR to target its programming and resource allocation as it aims to reduce obstacles or otherwise improve the ability of SBs/DBEs to successfully contract with Caltrans.

The objectives of this study are to formulate policies and practices that can be used to identify place names that have derogatory or racist linkages and provide recommendations on how to rename or remove harmful names and monuments in the California transportation right of way (ROW). This study was requested by the California Department of Transportation and conducted through the University of California, Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies Technology Transfer Program.

Automated vehicle (AV) deployment can bring about transformational changes to transportation and society as a whole. The infrastructure owner-operators (IOOs), who own, maintain, and operate the infrastructure, have the opportunity to work jointly with the AV industry to provide safe and efficient operations. A key question for the IOOs is, “What transportation infrastructure improvements do AV manufacturers believe will facilitate and improve AV performance?” This study was designed to address this question through a comprehensive survey approach, including an online survey and follow-up interviews. A list of ten questions was discussed, covering the physical and digital infrastructure, infrastructure maintenance, standards and specifications, policy support, data sharing, and so forth. The researchers reached out to more than 60 entities who hold the AV testing permit in California. In total, 20 companies responded. They were from different sectors and well represented the AV industry. From the results of this study, it is concluded that the most important roadway characteristics that have the potential to benefit the automated driving system (ADS) are: (1) digital mapping and signage; (2) lane markings; (3) work zone and incident information; (4) vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications; (5) actual traffic signals; (6) general signage; and (7) lighting. The digital features considered most critical to help accelerate ADS deployment include work zone and road closure information, traffic signal phase and timing, and traffic congestion. This study provides diverse voices and in-depth insights into topics that the AV industry and IOOs should engage in to advance AVs’ deployment.

Marked crosswalks are the primary means of safeguarding pedestrian travel at intersections in American cities. In the face of decades-high pedestrian fatalities nationwide, the provision of adequate cross walks is highly salient. Though, how they are spatially distributed across an entire city, and vary by neighborhood, has drawn little academic scrutiny. Given that, this study utilizes satellite imagery to map the presence of marked crosswalks throughout San Francisco, a dense, walkable city that has struggled to reach its pedestrian-safety goals. For the first time, this allows for a calculation of 'crosswalk coverage' for the city as a whole. Manual review of satellite imagery documents that cross walks are present at 58% of San Francisco’s roughly 6,400intersections, though they are not evenly distributed across neighborhoods. Both hotspot analysis and comparing crosswalk coverage by Census tracts demonstrates that northern neighborhoods –even outside of the downtown core–maintain higher percentages of intersections with cross walks than those in the southern half. Intersections exhibit crosswalk ‘corridor effects,’ in that crosswalks often cluster along certain streets, including (but not limited to) commercial areas. In addition, crosswalks in four neighborhoods were analyzed to a deeper extent, including category (e.g. ladder, continental, standard), condition, and ‘completeness’ or the number of adjacent blocks with a connecting crosswalk. Across these roughly 1,000 intersections, coverage varied from 51%in the Bayview (a historic African American community) to 83%in Pacific Heights (a high-income, majority-white neighborhood). Though these patterns track somewhat with local pedestrian and automobile volumes, crosswalk coverage diverges from these data in many ways, indicating other factors at play in their distribution. Overall, satellite imagery can be used to identify marked crosswalks at scale, evaluate their quality, and probe geographic variation. Armed with such granular data, planners can consider the ways in which crosswalks are present throughout cities —and where notable gaps exist —in their pursuit of Vision Zero goals.

Transit stops serve as crucial components of journeys for riders, but their condition is often left out of equity considerations. Two important empirical questions are what stop amenities, such as places to sit, clear sign age, shelters for inclement weather, and unobstructed curbs are present, and how are they distributed across systems, which may reveal neighborhood or route-specific disparities. San Francisco, CA represents an ideal case for which to pursue this question, given it maintains a ‘transit first’ policy directive that mandates public space prioritize transit over private automobiles. An in-person census of 2964 street-level bus stops was conducted over three months, which finds that a majority of stops lack both seating and shelter of any kind, that route sign age varies widely in format and legibility, and that roughly one third of all stops are obstructed by on-street parking, rendering them difficult to use and exposing riders to on coming traffic. Stops in the city’s northern half are more likely to feature seating, shelter, and unobstructed curbs, whereas amenity “coldspots” nearly all lie within the city’s southern half. Stop amenities also vary sharply by bus route, such that routes with the longest headways (and thus waiting times) provide on average the least seating, shelter, and clear curbs. These three amenities– seating, shelter, and unobstructed curbs– are also present to a greater degree in Census tracts with higher shares of white residents. This census demonstrates that equity evaluations of transit must include stop amenities, which are often overlooked, can undermine transit’s attractiveness, and even compound long-standing imbalances in service quality for underserved communities. Furthermore, studies of this kind can inform where amenity upgrades should be prioritized, targeting those areas currently lacking in high-quality stops, and raising the minimum standard of stop amenities overall. Finally, given data collected in this census is almost entirely unavailable to riders within current trip-planning and wayfinding applications, this work raises the possibility of expanding transit-data standards to include amenity details.

Advances in the sharing economy – such as transportation network companies (e.g., Lyft, Uber) and home sharing (e.g., Airbnb) – have coincided with the increasing need for evacuation resources. While peer-to-peer sharing under normal circumstances often suffers from trust barriers, disaster literature indicates that trust and compassion often increase following disasters, improving recovery efforts. We hypothesize that trust and compassion could trigger willingness to share transportation and sheltering resources during an evacuation.

To test this hypothesis, we distributed a survey to individuals impacted by the 2017 Southern California Wildfires (n=226) and the 2018 Carr Wildfire (n=284). We estimate binary logit choice models, finding that high trust in neighbors and strangers and high compassion levels significantly increase willingness to share across four sharing scenarios. Assuming a high trust/compassion population versus a low trust/compassion population results in a change of likelihood to share between 30% and 55%, depending on scenario. Variables related to departure timing and routing – which capture evacuation urgency – increase transportation sharing willingness. Volunteers in past disasters and members of community organizations are usually more likely to share, while families and previous evacuees are typically less likely. Significance of other demographic variables is highly dependent on the scenario. Spare seatbelts and bed capacity, while increasing willingness, are largely insignificant. These results suggest that future sharing economy strategies should cultivate trust and compassion before disasters via preparedness within neighborhoods, community-based organizations, and volunteer networks, during disasters through communication from officials, and after disasters using resilience-oriented and community-building information campaigns.

In the context of implementation of SB 743 (Steinberg, 2013), staff at the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) have been developing guidance documents on how to calculate induced travel, working with their counterparts at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR). OPR’s technical advisory discusses two methods for estimating induced travel: an approach based on the application of travel models and an approach using elasticities drawn from the peer-reviewed literature (such as the National Center for Sustainable Transportation (NCST) induced travel calculator. Caltrans is developing internal guidance to help its analysts choose the best method (or combination of methods) for assessing induced travel from projects on the State Highway System, and has been holding meetings to provide stakeholders with opportunities to express their views and voice their concerns about the drafts