NASA Ames Aviation Research Partnership,

Sustainable Fuels Working Group,

Chengdu Transit and

PATH at 20

In previous issues of NewsBITS, 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; the current issue provides 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 accompanying article, which includes an interview with some of our researchers.

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 this issue.

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 covered in another article in this issue.

I wish you all a happy, healthy and successful new year.

—Samer Madanat, Director, Institute of Transportation Studies, Berkeley