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NCST Researchers at the
Transportation Research Board 99th Annual Meeting
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The NCST had the opportunity to engage with national policymakers in Washington DC in January as part of the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting. The NCST organized a briefing on Capitol Hill to present recent freight |
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sustainability research to an audience of congressional staff, industry, non-governmental, and federal agency representatives. Researchers from three NCST universities presented their findings: Dr. Lew Fulton, Director of the UC Davis Sustainable Transportation Energy Pathways Program; Sue Dexter, an Urban Planning and Development PhD candidate at the University of Southern California; and Dr. Kanok Boriboonsomsin, assistant research engineer with UC Riverside’s Center for Environmental Research and Technology.
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Dr. Kelly Fleming, Dr. Austin Brown, Amy Lee, and Dr. Alan Jenn with Congressman John Garamendi (center), representative of California's 3rd congressional district, home to UC Davis. |
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NCST staff and researchers also met with a dozen offices of members of Congress to share our work, learn about current transportation policy issues, and identify knowledge gaps that we can help fill. NCST research served as the basis for discussions about national legislation related to electric vehicle incentives and infrastructure, zero-emission buses and trucks, automated vehicles, alternative transportation modes, and transportation finance mechanisms. |
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UC Riverside Takes
Eco-driving Simulator to the
Consumer Electronics Show
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Driver assistance technology that saves gas and reduces vehicle emissions took a road trip to the world’s most influential technology trade show in Las Vegas this January. Attendees at the Consumer Electronics Show had the opportunity to try out cooperative merging technology created at the UC Riverside Center for Environmental Research and Technology (CE-CERT), using a high-fidelity driving simulator. The technology was developed at UC Riverside and funded through the National Center for Sustainable Transportation.
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The fourth Annual 3 Revolutions Policy Conference will take place March 24-25, 2020, at UC Davis, with a cross-cutting theme of
Climate and Equity.
This event will leverage the success of the past three 3 Revolutions Policy Conferences, aiming to dive deeper in identifying solutions for how the 3 Revolutions in transportation (sharing, electrification, and automation) can achieve equitable climate solutions. Key issues include data sharing, micromobility adoption, automated vehicle governance, ridehailing emission policy, and the evolution of public transit. The conference will tackle these challenges by highlighting strategies and innovative solutions. This year’s conference will engage voices from a diverse set of stakeholders, including members of disadvantaged communities, commercial drivers, car dealerships, land-use experts, energy utilities, tech companies, and elected officials.
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International Symposium on Pavement, Roadway, and Bridge Life Cycle Assessment
June 3-6, 2020 – Sacramento, CA
The NCST and the University of California Pavement Research Center are proud to be hosting LCA 2020! The goal of the symposium is to share and discuss recent advances in life cycle assessment (LCA) for pavement, roadways, and bridges, and review and discuss the current status and future developments, standardization and implementation of pavement, roadway, and bridge LCA. The symposium will include keynote speakers, plenary presentations, parallel podium sessions, poster sessions, panel sessions with group discussion, and social events.
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Webinars Available to Watch Now
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Making Bicycling Comfortable: Identifying minimum infrastructure needs using a video survey
Dr. Dillon Fitch | Co-Director, Bicycling
Plus Research Collaborative, Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis
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Understanding what environments are comfortable and perceived as safe for bicyclists is essential for increasing bicycling, particularly for non-experienced riders. In this webinar, Dr. Dillon Fitch uses results from his recent study to discuss the limitations of on-road |
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bicycling infrastructure, and the range of effects person- and road-level attributes have on bicycling comfort. In the study, researchers used video survey data to analyze bicycling comfort and its relationship with socio-demographics, bicycling attitudes, and bicycling behavior, as well as used to identify minimum on-road infrastructure needed to support comfortable bicycling.
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The Importance of Life Cycle Assessment in Evaluating the Environmental Performance of Future Electric Vehicles
Dr. Alissa Kendall | Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Davis
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As electric vehicles become more efficient, low-carbon electricity becomes more common, and the size of the global EV fleet increases, emissions from production and other non-operation parts of the life cycle become increasingly important. |
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This webinar presents research on the impact of excluding life cycle emissions from vehicle production and other parts of the vehicle and energy life cycle from ZEV policies. |
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UC Davis Dissertation Grant Awardees |
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Congratulations to our UC Davis dissertation grant recipients from the Fall 2019 cycle: Xinwei Li, Julio Paniagua, and Han Yang! Our recent awardees are contributing to research on electric vehicle charging infrastructure, pavement performance, and highway traffic management.
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Xinwei Li's research focuses on EV charging infrastructure spatial modeling and consists of three major phases: building an optimization model to identify the optimal EV charger placement and charging management while respecting individual mobility requirements and electricity pricing; investigating the energy and environmental implications of individual behavior under optimal charging strategies; and assessing the long-term renewable benefits from EV-grid integration. |
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Julio Paniagua's research is focused on the development of recommendations and guidance on the use of thin bonded concrete overlays (BCOA) as a rehabilitation alternative for California based on the adoption of, and improvements to, the technology developed in other U.S. states. |
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Han Yang focuses on estimation of the systematic errors of traffic data collected over a transportation network. Without appropriate treatment, the potential imperfection in the sensor data may significantly impede the correct traffic estimation and management decision. Han's research attempts to find an approach to process the data, so that the true traffic information can be recovered. |
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Planning and Policymaking for Transit-Oriented Development, Transit, and Active Transport in California Cities
Elisa Barbour, Salvador Grover, Yulia Lamoureaux, Gyanedra Chaudhary, and Susan Handy | University of California, Davis |
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This report provides findings from the first year of a two-year research project on patterns of local policymaking in California to support transit-oriented development (TOD), transit, and active transport. The project aims to assess motivations, perceived obstacles, and priorities for development near transit, in relation to patterns of local policy adoption, from the perspective of city planners in the state’s four largest regions: the San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Sacramento metropolitan areas. |
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This first-stage report discusses research and policy context that informed the methodology, findings from the analysis of results from an online survey of city planning directors administered in the spring of 2019, and findings from two case studies of TOD policymaking in urban central cities, namely Los Angeles and Sacramento. |
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Development of Eco-Friendly Ramp Control for Connected and Automated Electric Vehicles
Guoyuan Wu, Zhouqiao Zhao, Ziran Wang, and Matthew Barth | University of California, Riverside |
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With on-board sensors such as camera, radar, and Lidar, connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) can sense the surrounding environment and be driven autonomously and safely by themselves without colliding into other objects on the road. CAVs are also able to communicate with each other and roadside infrastructure, sharing information and enabling CAVs to make decisions in a collaborative manner. In this project, the research team proposed a ramp merging system that allowed cooperative maneuvers for CAVs on the ramp to merge into mainline traffic flow, with controllability of ramp inflow rate which enabled overall traffic flow control. Simulation results showed that under the regulated inflow rate, the proposed system was able to avoid potential traffic congestion and improve the mobility (in terms of average speed) as much as 115%, compared to conventional ramp metering. |
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Developing an Adaptive Strategy for Connected Eco-Driving Under Uncertain Traffic and Signal Conditions
Peng Hao, Zhensong Wei, Zhengwei Bai, and Matthew Barth | University of California, Riverside |
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In the real-world traffic, traffic conditions and signal timings are usually dynamic and uncertain due to mixed vehicle types, various driving behaviors and limited sensing range, which is challenging in EAD development. This research proposes an adaptive strategy for connected eco-driving towards a signalized intersection under real world conditions. |
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"I See Myself in that Career": Exploring Methods to Attract the Next Generation Transportation Workforce
Marissa McFadden, Glenn McRae, and Hannah Ullman |
The
University of Vermont
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Predicting a workforce crisis for the past twenty years, the transportation field has launched a wide variety of initiatives to increase the future talent pipeline that would choose transportation as a field of choice for study and future careers. This project follows on the premise that increasing awareness of career opportunities is essential to attracting new entrants at an early age, and that awareness building should be dynamic. This includes providing views of who works in the transportation field, what their experiences are, and what they value about their work. This paper hypothesizes that first-person glimpses into transportation careers are just as essential for job seekers as knowing job specs, qualifications, pay scales and opportunities for advancement. |
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In-depth career profiles of workers were developed and showcase individuals, from diverse backgrounds and interests, engaged in work critical to the future of our transportation systems and infrastructure as an inducement to consider future education and training work needed to enter such a field.
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Genetic Toolkit for Assessment and Prediction of Population-Level Impacts of Bridge Construction on Birds
Rachael Bay, Lisa Tell, Nicole Adams, and Ruta R. Bandivadekar | University of California, Davis
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Recent studies have highlighted alarming rates of declines in bird populations across the country. Recently, genetic and genomic tools have provided a method for understanding population structure, allowing for more informed delineation of management units. |
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The goal of this project was to create a genetic toolkit for identifying breeding populations and assigning individuals to those populations. Ultimately, such tools could be used to assess population-level impacts when there are conflicts with birds at infrastructure construction sites.
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User Perceptions of Safety and Security: A Framework for a Transition to Electric-Shared-Automated Vehicles
Kenneth Kurani |
University of California, Davis
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This white paper focuses on actual and potential users of systems of electrically-powered, shared, and automated vehicles (e-SAVs) as well as other road-users, e.g., pedestrians and cyclists. The role of user perceptions of safety and security are reviewed to create an initial framework to evaluate how they may affect who will initially use systems of e-SAVs for personal mobility and how safety and security will have to be addressed to foster sustained transitions. The paper primarily serves as a resource for e-SAV user research, but will also inform system development, operation, and governance by offering an overarching framework grounded in the social theory of “risk society” and thus organizes past work that, typically, focuses on only one of the constituent technologies or on one dimension of safety or security. |
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Understanding the Distributional Impacts of Vehicle Policy: Who Buys New and Used Electric Vehicles?
Erich Muehlegger and David S. Rapson | University of California, Davis |
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This policy brief summarizes findings from a project which examined the proliferation of EVs during a period in which the market has matured to include new technologies, |
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a growing secondary market has evolved, and a suite of policies has been put in place to promote switching away from gasoline-powered cars. This brief addresses conventional wisdom that rates of EV adoption are correlated with income in the period studied.
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A Combined Urban Metabolism and Life Cycle Assessment Approach to Improve the Sustainability of Urban Hardscapes
Ali A. Butt, John T. Harvey, and Alissa Kendall | University of California, Davis
Hui Li and Yuxin Zhu | Tongji University, China
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Streets, sidewalks, parking areas, plazas, and other paved surfaces cover large portions of urban areas. These urban hardscapes contribute significantly to cities’ resource consumption. Although urban hardscapes enable people and goods to move freely, they also have profound impacts on cities’ water, air quality, energy, and material use. Reducing
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the environmental impacts of hardscapes will be an important component of making cities more sustainable. The necessary first step is to quantify those impacts.
This research brief summaries the associated project, which developed a methodology that combines urban metabolism (UM) and life cycle assessment (LCA) to examine the life cycle impacts of hardscapes at the urban scale rather than at the product or project scale.
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The National Center for Sustainable Transportation is a consortium of leading universities committed to advancing an environmentally sustainable transportation system through cutting-edge research, direct policy engagement, and education of our future leaders. Consortium members: University of California, Davis; University of California, Riverside; University of Southern California; California State University, Long Beach; Georgia Institute of Technology; and the University of Vermont.
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