The University of California Transportation Center (UCTC) is a multi-campus organization headquartered on the UC Berkeley campus.
UCTC carries out basic and applied research, published in journals and on the Center's web site. Our consortium focuses on three themes identified by USDOT in its strategic plan—environmental sustainability, economic competitiveness, and livability—and, importantly, the connections between them. Advancing each of these objectives is important in and of itself; however, our UTC recognizes that the three are closely inter-twined and oftentimes co-dependent. Our UTC will thus give particular attention to the synergies that can be created and cross purposes that are served when working in a coordinated fashion on all three fronts.
We organize and participate in conferences and workshops to discuss our research findings, inform public policy, and identify new and emerging research needs. We work with international, national, state, regional and local agencies and private organizations to put our research findings into practice.
We offer fellowships and mount new courses to entice the best students into careers in transportation. We support education programs of UC academic departments offering transportation degrees, run training sessions, lectures, and symposia for practitioners, and publish a magazine designed to communicate our work to a broad nontechnical audience.
We are funded by the US Department of Transportation and the California Department of Transportation.
UCTC’s mission is to significantly advance the state of the art in transportation research and practice and to expand the workforce of transportation professionals. To accomplish this, we 1) carry out basic and applied research, 2) support top-flight, multidisciplinary education programs, 3) provide an ongoing technology transfer programs that make research results available to a wide range of users in forms that can be readily implemented or applied. and 4) co-sponsor new transportation research, education, and tech transfer activities and entrerprises during their critical start-up phases.