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Grants and Administration—Faculty Research Grants

Faculty Grants Awarded for Fiscal Year 2010-2011

May 22, 2010—UCTC Director Robert Cervero announced this week the award decisions for UCTC faculty research grants for Fiscal Year 2010-2011, the coming fiscal year.

Seventeen faculty proposals—from UC Berkeley, Irvine, Riverside, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara—were awarded research funding.

Among the topics they address are: tools for implementing SB 375 (the nation's first law to control greenhouse gas emissions by curbing sprawl); the environmental impacts of goods movement; freight operations; high-speed rail; bus rapid transit; plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs); low emission vechicles (LEVs); alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs); ways to encourage transit-oriented development (TOD); intersection safety; and smartphones' potential to change travel behavior.

Their proposals are summarized below. Fuller descriptions of the FY 2010-2011 funded proposals are here. (Listed in order, according to the last name of the lead researcher.)

  1. ECO-Friendly Navigation System Research for Heavy-Duty Trucks Project -- Develop routing algorithms for heavy-duty trucks to reduce emissions and fuel use, taking into consideration traffic congestion and elevation changes. (Matthew Barth, UC Riverside)
  2. Spatially Focused Travel Survey Data Collection and Analysis: Closing Data Gaps for SB 375 Implementation -- Methods for low-cost, rapid collection of local travel data to provide support for policy decisions to implement SB 375 (Marlon Boarnet and Douglas Houston, UC Irvine)
  3. Development and Evaluation of Intelligent Energy Management Strategies for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles -- An intelligent energy management system to optimize the performance of PHEVs, taking into account charge depletion and recharging, using data from a pre-planned itinerary and other information (Kanook Boriboonsomsin, UC Riverside)
  4. TOD, infill housing, and car share: A feasibility study -- The feasibility of linking car sharing with TOD in order to reduce parking requirements and make TOD more affordable (Karen Chapple and Jacob Wegmann, UC Berkeley)
  5. Psychological economics, travel behavior, residential location choice, and sustainability: Possible new rationales for policy intervention -- The role of imperfect decision making when households underestimate the costs and overstate the benefits of locating in the suburbs to help suggest approaches that could encourage more households to locate in denser regions (Daniel G. Chatman and Joan Walker, UC Berkeley)
  6. Behavioral Integration of Location, Activity and Travel Behavior -- Using ideas from time geography and intrahousehold bargaining behavior combined with a fractal approach to create models of location activity and travel in Southern California to better assess land use policies (Konstadinos Goulias, UC Santa Barbara)
  7. Affordable Housing in Transportation Corridors—Built Environment, Accessibility, and Air Pollution Implications of Near-Roadway Residential Locations -- Examine the distribution of Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) and Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) affordable housing projects in relation to the built environment, transportation, and near-roadway air pollution hazards, with a focus on goods movement corridors, to improve site selection and design (Doug Houston, Jun Wu, and Dongwoo Yang, UC Irvine)
  8. Drivers' Asynchronous Day-to-Day Route Choices with Information Provision -- A new model framework to study how information from advanced traveler information systems (ATIS) affects drivers' day-to-day route choices with the objective of understanding temporal rhythms and ways to use ATIS to make transportation systems more stable (Wenlong Jin, UC Irvine)
  9. The Economics of Speed—Assessing the performance of High Speed Rail in Intermodal Transportation -- Develop an understanding of the relation between speed and the performance of high-speed rail systems in intermodal networks in order to make more accurate performance assessments of high-speed rail in this setting (Adib Kanafani, UC Berkeley)
  10. Impact of Access Modes on Urban Transit Systems Technology and Network Configuration -- Study the speed and cost characteristics of transit-trunk lines to determine if alternative access modes can make capital-intensive technologies such as rail or bus rapid transit economically competitive as the backbone of urban transit systems. (Samer Madanat and Yuwei Li, UC Berkeley)
  11. A Dynamic Normative Model of Conditions for Viability of Alternative Fuel Vehicles (Will Recker, UC Irvine)
  12. Tour-Based and Activity-Based Modeling of Clean Trucks at Southern California Ports -- Develop models that reflect the complexities of freight movements and advances in logistics in order to provide greater insight into the spatial and temporal operations of drayage port trucks to reduce congestion and emissions (Stephen G. Ritchie, UC Irvine)
  13. Greening freight transportation: An analysis of some social benefits from shifting freight traffic to off-peak hours --Develop a better assessment of the social benefits of shifting freight operations to off-peak times, focusing on accidents, congestion, and air pollution, using the operations at the San Pedro Bay ports of Los Angeles ( Jean-Daniel Saphores, R. Jayakrishnan, and Jun Wu, UC Irvine)
  14. Up in the Air: New Urban Designs for LRT Stations in Highway Medians -- Examine possible new designs for highway-median light-rail transit (LRT) developments to better tie the stations into surrounding neighborhoods, thus enabling transit-oriented development (TOD) in problematic sites (Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Dana Cuff, and Harrison T. Higgins, UCLA)
  15. Measuring intersection safety -- Use a new approach to measure signalized intersections' safety by modifying controllers to extract the signal phase and synchronize it with each vehicle's speed and analyze the resulting data to derive a measure of safety for the intersection (Pravin Varaiya and Roberto Horowitz, UC Berkeley)
  16. CommunityBuilder: Integrating Community Visioning, Modeling, and Planning -- Building on two widely used platforms for community visioning and other elements of stakeholder engagement in the planning process, this project will create an open source programming platform for developing plans in support of SB 375 (Paul Waddell, UC Berkeley)
  17. Revisiting the use of traveler information to induce mode shifts -- Working from new smartphone traveler information technology developed at UC Berkeley, the researchers will develop a new mobile traveler information application, use it to collect real-life data, and develop models to determine the software's impact and its potential to shift travelers away from the automobile (Joan Walker and Raja Sengupta, UC Berkeley)

Fuller descriptions of the FY 2010-2011 funded UCTC faculty research proposals are here.