Director's Message: Archive
ITS Berkeley's distinguished directors summarize institutional activities and research highlights through these regular addresses, initially published in NewsBITS, ITS's quarterly newsletter.
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
Summer 2008 (Acting Director's Message)
The academic year has drawn to a close, and I’m happy to announce that it has been marked by a good many favorable developments for the Institute. Last month, for example, the U.S. DOT awarded its inaugural SafeTrip-21 grant, a competition that encourages partnerships for innovative technology, to a public-private consortium that includes two ITS centers: the California Center for Innovative Transportation (CCIT) and California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH).
The grant funds the next phase of CCIT’s ground-breaking research that taps the potential of cell phone networks to both collect and share real-time information on traffic conditions and transit operations. CCIT, in partnership with Nokia, Navteq, Nissan, Caltrans, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and others, will demonstrate work at this November's World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems.
The SafeTrip-21 award also provides key support for PATH researchers to build upon their ongoing work to enable communication between vehicles and roadway infrastructure (e.g., to alert drivers to road hazards). PATH is also gearing up to move its bus rapid transit guidance system off of the Richmond Field Station and onto city streets and highways. A summer demonstration along an AC Transit route in San Leandro, Calif., will launch the deployment phase of the technology's development, which gets underway in July with sponsorship from the Federal Transit Administration, the Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans).
Our UC Berkeley Volvo Center for Future Urban Transport has also seen its share of success. In May, for example, it hosted the Volvo Foundation's annual conference and workshop on urban transport. It was an outstanding event by all accounts. On a similar note, earlier this year UC Berkeley was named to host the 19th International Symposium of Traffic and Transportation Theory, to be held in July 2011. The symposium is a premier event among transport theorists (so mark your calendars!).
I'm also pleased to report that the Institute has added a key member to its staff. Ann Brody Guy joined us in November as the new Communications Director and has since been doing a terrific job in strengthening and developing communication links, both within the Institute and with the outside world.
Not all the news has been happy. This year we have also been touched by profound sorrow. I'm speaking here of the unexpected death of Professor Alex Farrell, who directed the Transportation Sustainability Research Center. Alex was an exceptionally fine young scholar—a real rising star—and was the best kind of colleague. His passing leaves a hole that will never really be filled. And yet, the Sustainability Center will continue its important work, as it must. In this regard, we are indebted to doctors Susan Shaheen and Timothy Lipman, who have stepped in to jointly serve as the Center's acting directors.
Speaking of acting directors, the close of the academic year means that my tenure as Acting ITS Director is nearing its end. Samer Madanat returns this summer and will resume his leadership of the Institute. I'm grateful for having had the chance to fill in during Samer's absence, and I have greatly enjoyed the added opportunities this has given me to work with the people who make up ITS.
Have a good and productive summer,
—Mike Cassidy, Acting Director (but only for another month or so!)
Fall 2007 (Acting Director's Message)
As Samer Madanat is on sabbatical leave for the coming year, I have the pleasure of stepping in—temporarily—as Acting Director of ITS.
Notwithstanding Samer’s repeated claims (to me) that his big shoes are impossible to fill, the Institute continues to move forward, and a number of very positive happenings have transpired in recent months. I’ll take this opportunity to report briefly on just a few of these: they concern additions in senior staff and our library.
As regards the first matter, I’m happy to announce that Tom West has joined the Institute as the new director of CCIT. Tom comes to us with a distinguished record of service at Caltrans, particularly in the areas of technology application to transport systems. Most recently, he helped lead the Governor’s "Go California" initiative to develop forward-looking transportation and land-use policies for the state.
I’m also delighted to report that Laura Melendy has taken the helm as the new director of our Technology Transfer Program. Laura, too, brings with her a rich background in transport. She is an alumnus of Berkeley’s graduate program in transportation, she has considerable management experience, and for the last three years she has been Tech Transfer’s Communications Director.
Finally, let me call attention to the fund raising campaign now underway for our Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library. Those of us connected in any way with the Institute know what a priceless resource we have in the library—and in its knowledgeable (and helpful!) staff. Perhaps less known to many of us are the library's ongoing efforts to enhance the accessibility of its collection by going digital.
These efforts bring new challenges—and added expenses. Thus our fund-raising campaign is a call to all of us who have benefited so much from the library: donations are needed now more than ever. (For information on how you can give, see the Library's donations page or the recent article in the ITS Review detailing specific library "wish list" items).
With the fresh perspectives and energies brought by our new center directors, along with the ongoing enhancements to our library, and combined with the continued support of our community at large, ITS is poised to continue its service long into the future. (This assumes, of course, that Samer Madanat doesn’t extend his sabbatical and leave me in charge for too long!)
Best regards,
—Mike Cassidy (Acting Director)
In previous messages, I described some of the ongoing research and educational initiatives at UC Berkeley in the field of transportation. Several of these initiatives have attained critical mass in the past few months. Here is an update.
NEXTOR's NASA Ames Partnership
On the air transportation side, a team of faculty including NEXTOR co-director Mark Hansen and Alexandre Bayen, who joined UC Berkeley last year as a member of the CEE systems program, has strengthened our relationship with the NASA Ames Center.
At the core of this expansion is a large research project in the field of air traffic control, which brings together ITS researchers and researchers at NASA Ames. Some of the graduate students involved in these projects have decided to make a career out of air traffic control research, and have "gone over to the other side" this year to join the sponsor team. More on this story is provided in the Winter 2007 NewsBITS.
Transportation Sustainability: A New Working Group on Fuels
On the ground, our initiatives in transportation sustainability research are also accelerating. The new joint Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC) has focused its activities thus far on questions of alternate transportation fuels. Its seminar series last semester served as a focal point to generate interest from faculty in several campus departments.
With the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, TSRC is organizing a working group on transportation fuels in the spring semester, with a membership of 12 faculty and researchers, ranging from Political Science to Agricultural and Resource Economics.
The Chengdu Project: Sustainable Urban Transportation
While developing and deploying alternate transportation fuels is one approach to achieving sustainability in transportation, this will not be sufficient. A complementary approach is to reduce energy consumption through significant mode shift to public transportation, which has additional benefits of reducing congestion and decreasing vehicle emissions and other environmental externalities. While it is unfortunately true that transit ridership in the U.S. cannot be expected to increase in the foreseeable future, this is not the case in the developing world.
I believe that rapidly motorizing cities in China and other developing countries are where transportation researchers and planners have the greatest opportunity for improving transportation sustainability through large increases in transit ridership.
And it is also where such developments are most needed. Automobile ownership in China is growing at the alarming rate of 80 percent each year. By the end of 2006, it is expected that nine out of every 1,000 Chinese citizens will own a car, bringing the number of automobiles on Chinese streets to nearly 13 million.
If this rate of increase continues, the number will rise tenfold to more than 130 million automobiles by 2010! The effects of this unsustainable growth are already manifest in severe traffic congestion problems in larger cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai. The projected associated greenhouse gas emissions have dangerous global implications. Already, 10 percent of China’s almost 4 billion metric tons of CO2 emitted each year is due to the transport sector, and China is poised to become the world’s leader in greenhouse gas emissions before 2020.
Similar unsustainable levels of automobile ownership are projected for cities in many other large developing countries including India, Mexico, and South Africa.
The good news is that, at least in China, governments (from the local to the national levels) recognize that this is a very serious problem and are anxious to intervene. And they realize that to arrest this trend, public transit will need to be more ubiquitous in Chinese cities. The national government in Beijing has established a target stating that by 2010, at least 30 percent of all trips made in any Chinese city are to be provided by public transit. As a result, city officials in China are very interested in what transportation researchers can do to help them achieve this target.
UC Berkeley transportation faculty and researchers are at the forefront of this engagement. Through the Volvo Center of Excellence in Future Urban Transport, Robert Cervero and two of his graduate students (Chris Cherry and Jenny Day) are investigating mode choice issues for dwellers of outlying housing development in Shanghai and quantifying the environmental footprint of electric bikes. Elizabeth Deakin and her students (Alley Thomas and Wendy Tao) have been studying bus rapid transit planning in Chinese cities.
Another group of ITS researchers, including Mike Cassidy, Yuwei Li, and me, are part of the Urban Sustainability Initiative at UC Berkeley. With funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, we have started a partnership with the local government in the city of Chengdu, to develop a fully integrated transit system for the city. Three graduate students are involved in this project. For more on these exciting developments, I refer you to the article in the Winter 2007 NewsBITS.
PATH Celebrates Its 20th Anniversary
While we geared up for new initiatives, we also took the time to celebrate our past and present achievements. This year was the 20th anniversary of PATH. This milestone was marked with a two-day symposium, which reviewed the history and contributions of the center.
The occasion was an appropriate time to reflect on the key elements that have facilitated the success of PATH, including a strong partnership with the California DOT, a core team of dynamic staff researchers, close interaction with private sector partners, and an extensive network of faculty and student researchers at UC Berkeley and other universities. All these parties were represented at the PATH@20 celebration, which is also covered in the Winter 2007 NewsBITS.
I wish you all a happy, healthy and successful new year.
—Samer Madanat
The explosive growth in demand for transportation worldwide has made transportation sustainability a central policy-making concern. It is an area of research and education in which Institute of Transportation Studies faculty and staff are playing a leading role.
Challenges to sustainability range from transportation’s global effects on climate change and energy and resource use to more localized concerns such as air quality around a specific facility or network.
Transportation systems can have strong impacts on the other realms relevant to sustainability: urban transport, for example, has an effect on land-use patterns, which in turn affect sprawl, whose detrimental effects include incursion into agricultural land and loss of natural habitat.
There is an increased awareness of the need to influence the transportation sector, so as to improve the sustainability of urban areas around the world. Research opportunities are increasing, as is funding from foundations, federal and state governments, and automobile manufacturers.
A number of initiatives are happening at UC Berkeley in this field, and ITS faculty members are actively engaged in them.
Last year, a new center was founded at ITS, with a focus on the future of urban transportation, with funding from the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations. Its theme is the interaction of technology and policy to improve urban transport sustainability.
Several UC Berkeley faculty members, including Dan Kammen and Alex Farrell in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG), as well as Tad Patzek in Civil and Environmental Engineering, have published important studies on the use of ethanol as a source of energy for transportation. Farrell currently teaches a course on Energy for Transportation Systems.
ITS-affiliated faculty members, such as Arpad Horvath and Rob Harley, have performed groundbreaking research on measuring and quantifying the environmental footprint of transportation systems.
Other ITS affiliated faculty, such as Robert Cervero, are focusing on the sustainability of transportation systems in developing countries, especially in Latin America and China.
Finally, ITS researchers are actively working with car companies to evaluate the usability of fuel cell (hydrogen) cars, and with Caltrans on a number of energy-related initiatives.
These activities, and others, are described in the accompanying article in the Spring 2006 NewsBITS.
On the educational front, we are launching a new certificate program in Intelligent Transportation Systems, which will start its activities in the fall semester. This certificate program aims to integrate transportation operations, communications, control and computation within a single curriculum.
It builds on more than 15 years of successful research, primarily at Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH), where these disciplines have been integrated to produce cutting edge research products in vehicle control and safety systems, advanced traffic management systems, traveler information systems, and vehicle-infrastructure integration.
The Civil and Environmental Engineering department at UC Berkeley, jointly with the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will administer this certificate program. The certificate was designed by several ITS faculty affiliates, including Alex Skabardonis, Alexandre Bayen, Roberto Horowitz, and Pravin Varaiya.
ITS Berkeley continues to produce some of the best students in the nation. In this past year alone, we have seen several of our Ph.D. students land faculty positions in top tier universities the U.S. These include Noreen McDonald (University of Virginia), Yanfeng Ouyang (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), Jan Whittington and Anne Goodchild (University of Washington), and Jorge Laval (Georgia Tech). Other Ph.D. students have started academic careers around the world or have joined prestigious research centers.
Our M.S. program graduates work in federal, state, or metropolitan government or join the ranks of successful consulting firms in the U.S. or abroad, many of which were founded by ITS Berkeley graduates.
In order to increase our funding base and to continue supporting these outstanding students, we have recently launched an affiliate program for ITS. This program is described at http://www.its.berkeley.edu/giving.
Other initiatives that we are working on include:
-The next World Conference on Transportation Research, which ITS Berkeley will host jointly with UCTC in June 2007, and which will take place on the UC Berkeley campus; abstracts are due by April 28, and can be submitted on-line at the conference Web site: http://www.uctc.net/wctrs/
-The Global Metropolitan Studies Center, a new cross-cutting educational program in which several ITS faculty are involved, including UCTC Director Betty Deakin and me; more information can be found on the GMS Web site: http://www.uctc.net/metrostudies/
-And last but not least, the growing CEE Systems Program, about which you can read more in the Spring 2006 issue of NewsBITS.
—Samer Madanat
This is an exciting time to be working in the field of transportation research. Not only is the field expanding in multiple directions, but opportunities are emerging that call for multidisciplinary approaches.
For example, research teams composed of traffic engineers, system engineers, human factor specialists, and communications engineers are collaborating to develop wireless communication systems for improving transportation safety and traffic operations. Transportation and environmental engineers are working together to explore innovative solutions aimed at reducing the environmental effects of motorized transportation in urban areas.
At the same time, improved methods of investigation are creating a renewed interest in older problems, such as transit operations and planning and logistics and supply chain management. A new appreciation for the critical role that mobility plays in the quality of life in urban areas is leading planners to study with fresh eyes the interaction of land use and transportation. In addition, the conflicting pressures of security and efficiency are calling for new methods to address congestion at airports, ports and other terminals.
ITS Berkeley researchers, students and faculty are actively engaged in many of these developments through a group of new initiatives, including two new research centers.
The California Center for Innovative Transportation (CCIT) was founded in 2001 in collaboration with Caltrans as a unit within California PATH to support the commercialization of Intelligent Transportation Systems technologies. In 2003, CCIT spun off from PATH to pursue a broader and more ambitious mission: to facilitate the deployment of transportation research results in the field by working with state and regional transportation agencies and private sector vendors.
CCIT represents a commitment by ITS to deploy our research in the real world in ways that will make a difference to the traveling public. CCIT’s first group of projects focuses on technologies that were developed at PATH. In the next few years, it will expand its portfolio of projects to include other research results.
If CCIT’s activities are considered “last-mile” research, those of the Berkeley Center for Future Urban Transport, a Volvo Center of Excellence, are located at the other extreme of the research spectrum. Funded by a five-year grant from the Volvo Research and Educational foundations after a tough international competition, this center is a nice addition to the ITS family.
The center’s theme is the interplay of policy and technology in solving urban transport problems, and a significant part of its research agenda has been drawn from problems specific to individual cities around the world. By working with international partners in cities in China, Chile, Spain, Japan, France, and possibly other countries in the future, the center’s researchers will develop solutions to problems of accessibility, mobility, sustainability and safety that are specifically tailored to individual cities.
This new center represents one of the largest international research collaborations that ITS Berkeley has ever embarked on. Because funding for the center comes through a grant, it allows our faculty and students to explore highly innovative ideas without the constraints of project deadlines and deliverables. Eight ITS faculty members and up to 12 doctoral students will collaborate in these research activities.
In addition to our new research centers, new faculty associates are strengthening our research capabilities. The first two are affiliated with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the third is with the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research.
-Raja Sengupta is an expert in the development of Wireless Networks for Traffic Safety applications. He has a growing research program, funded by automobile manufacturers, and is working closely with the research and development staff at PATH.
-Alexandre Bayen joined UC Berkeley this year. He is a control expert with emphasis in air traffic and an interest in other transportation networks. His addition to the ITS family strengthens our Air Transportation research at NEXTOR.
-Max Shen adds to our strong programs in Logistics and Supply Chain Management. He joined the IEOR department at UC Berkeley this year after a short stint at the University of Florida.
Given these additions to our research activities and collaborators, we are starting this academic year on a high note.
—Samer Madanat