Academic researchers from ITS and Southwest Jiaotong University, along with municipal partners from Chengdu city government at meeting in Chengdu last summer

The Institute of Transportation Studies has joined forces with the city of Chengdu, China, and Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU) to help Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province, design and implement a wholly integrated transit system, as part of the new UC Berkeley-based Urban Sustainability Initiative (USI), launched in October with a $1.1 million initial one-year grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The initiative is intended to foster collaborations between UC Berkeley and a wide range of institutions in Asia, Africa and Latin America to match the latest knowledge available with decision-makers for implementation in the world’s fastest-growing urban areas. The USI is administered by the Berkeley Institute of the Environment (BIE) and is comprised of several elements. ITS is  leading the initiative’s transportation efforts, which account for roughly one-third of the total  budget. Additional funding is expected over the following two years.

The ITS team, which is led by Professors Samer Madanat and Michael Cassidy and ITS Researcher Yuwei Li, traveled to Chengdu in the summer of 2006 and established a partnership with SWJTU, whose Professor Dianye Zhang, is also Chengdu’s Deputy Commissioner of Communication, which means that he is the lead official in charge of the city’s transportation system.

Integrated Mass Transit

Chengdu's planned BRT system

The project will involve design and implementation of an integrated mass transit operation that will enable riders to seamlessly transfer between various components of the system.  The ITS team major contribution will be to design the feeder bus system  to connect with the city’s planned subway and bus rapid transit lines. Scheduling, trip planning and comprehensive signal coordination are among the elements needed for implementing the scheme. Additionally, extensive understanding of trip-making decisions will be developed through analysis and modeling using expertise developed by ITS researchers. They will be working closely with Southwest Jiaotong University researchers, who have developed an extensive data library of travel patterns and preferences for Chengdu residents.

How It Relates to the Moore Foundation's Urban Sustainaility Initiative (USI)

This project fulfills one of the primary goals of the initiative, which is to produce new technical and institutional capacities for decision-makers that are transferable and can be replicated in similar situations, thereby creating a living laboratory of sustainable transportation practices.

The project has another unique aspect, Madanat pointed out, in that it is applying a holistic approach to urban transportation sustainability. “We’re looking at the broad picture of sustainable systems,” he said, rather than focusing on discrete pieces of the transportation system, such as energy or vehicle design.

Chengdu's road network

 

A Mandate to Increase Transit Use

For Chengdu, the partnership represents a response to a government requirement that transit in China’s larger cities represent at least a 30 percent share of travel within 10 years. In Chengdu, that share is roughly 14 percent currently. The main modes the city’s decision-makers are hoping to replace are taxis and electric and gasoline-powered motorbikes, which contribute large amounts of pollution, both during their operation and in their after-lives and production.

Chengdu's planned metro system

Collaboration on Two Campuses

The collaboration extends beyond a simple exchange of knowledge. As part of the project, a professor from SWJTU will be spending time in Berkeley working with researchers and students at ITS, and students from ITS will be working in Chengdu with their counterparts at SWJTU, fulfilling another mandate of the Moore Foundation’s grant: intellectual cross-fertilization and exchange.

Finally, Madanat noted, the sustainable transportation methods and systems deployed and tested and perfected in Chengdu should be transferable to other cities undergoing similar growth, not just in China, but in other countries with rapidly motorizing urban areas .  He added: “Success in Chengdu will open the door for transferring our ideas to cities throughout the developing world. Through UC Berkeley’s Volvo Center of Excellence, we intend to customize our methods to a number of such cities, including Nairobi, Kenya (in collaboration with Volvo partners at Columbia University), Xian, China (with Volvo partners in China’s Center for Sustainable Transportation) and others.”