Message from the Director: Samer Madanat Spring 2006
This issue of NewsBITS, the third so far, discusses an area of research and education in which Institute of Transportation Studies faculty and staff are playing a leading role: transportation sustainability.
The explosive growth in demand for transportation worldwide has made sustainability a central policy-making concern. 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.
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 US. 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 PhD 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 on our Web site, 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 this issue of NewsBITS.
Happy reading.
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Last updated: June 12, 2006