about its>>Fall 2008 director's message
During my sabbatical year, which I spent in my native city, Amman, Jordan, I had the opportunity to do something academics often avoid: I got involved in the real world. I did this by providing technical advice to the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM).
GAM has set for itself the ambitious objective of transforming the city’s public transportation service from an ad hoc collection of privately operated small systems into an integrated and modern system.
This objective followed logically from the recommendation of GAM’s master plan, which aimed to reduce the spread of urban sprawl of the fast-growing city. The master plan envisioned achieving this through urban intensification and densification, two processes that depend heavily on shifting a large fraction of commuters from automobiles to public transportation. By increasing the mode share of public transport, GAM also hoped to improve air quality in the city and reduce fuel consumption, thus contributing to a reduction of the country’s energy bill. (Jordan imports petroleum from its neighbors Saudi Arabia and Iraq.)
My work with GAM exposed me to the complete range of issues facing growing cities in developing countries as they attempt to improve their public transport services: from the choice of institutional arrangement and operators’ contract, to detailed bus network design, passing through the economics of fare structures and subsidies. I came away with an awareness of the extremely difficult task that city officials face in making decisions with limited time and information. My small contribution to GAM was to impress upon my hosts the value of performing detailed and thorough studies that can inform their longer-term decisions.
As a step towards providing the type of studies that the city needs, Berkeley’s ITS and the Amman Institute (a non-profit organization owned by GAM) signed a Memorandum of Understanding in July. The MOU includes three areas in which ITS can contribute to assisting GAM: research, student internships and training. With our ongoing collaborations with Chengdu, China and Nairobi, Kenya, this MOU is another example of Berkeley’s ITS increasing global engagement.
This issue of NewsBITS reports on a number of other positive developments. First, we are very pleased to have added two new members to the Transportation community at UC Berkeley. Joan Walker joins our community as Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (with a joint appointment in the Global Metropolitan Studies center). Joan, who obtained her PhD from MIT in 2001, brings with her several years of professional practice and academic experience in the field of Travel Behavior Modeling. NewsBITS's Chris Cosgrove interviewed Joan earlier this month.
Across campus, the City and Regional Planning Department has successfully recruited Dan Chatman, currently on the faculty at Rutgers University, to fill the position that was created by Marty Wachs’ retirement in 2006. Dan will join Berkeley next summer, at which time we will have a longer piece on his research and experience.
I am also pleased to announce that Dan Kammen, Professor in the Energy and Resources Group and the Goldman School of Public Policy, and Class of '35 Distinguished Chair in Energy, has taken over at the helm of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center. Dan is arguably one of the most prominent experts in the U.S. in the field of alternative energy sources. Among Dan's many leadership positions on campus, he is co-director of the Berkeley Institute for the Environment and director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab. And he is no stranger to the faculty, researchers, and students at ITS, having led the Urban Sustainability Initiative, of which our Chengdu Transit project was a component.
As we welcome a new class of promising graduate students in Transportation Engineering and Transportation Planning we look forward to another year of achievement for ITS. Go Bears!
—Samer Madanat, Director, Institute of Transportation Studies, Berkeley
Madanat photo by Peg Skorpinski.
