Publications

This report assesses the potential use of express lane discounts as a driver of zero-emission vehicle adoption by testing the effectiveness of a range of discount scenarios. The researchers find that providing even very large discounts for express lane usage to zero-emission vehicles would only slightly increase vehicle sales but would make these lanes much less capable of serving their other purposes. As part of this project, an Excel tool was developed that allows users to test their own scenarios.

E-bike incentive programs are being utilized across the United States to encourage the adoption of active transportation. This study assesses the impacts of three e-bike rebate programs in Northern California using survey results gathered by each agency.

This report describes the scope and scale of car access in rural areas, identifies barriers that rural zero-car and car-deficit households face in their mobility and access, and proposes personal and policy-level adaptations that would help these households achieve their mobility and access needs using descriptive analysis from US census microdata and interviews with 22 residents of California’s Central Valley.

This study explores the impacts of latent attitudes, socio-demographic characteristics, and neighborhood effects on consumers’ current vehicle fuel type choice and their interest in purchasing or leasing an alternative fuel vehicles in the future.

This dissertation examines the potential effect of an incentive-based approach to rebalancing a dock-less e-bike-share fleet on bike-share use and social benefits, focusing mainly on VMT reduction, using a e-bike-share service in the Sacramento area, CA.

This project proposes to improve vehicle utilization and energy efficiency by modeling and evaluating the innovative shared mobility services for freight, with a specific focus on on-demand food delivery. Overall, the shared mobility service has great potential to reduce freight transportation VMT cost and emission. With well-designed delivery policy, the on-demand food delivery can mitigate traffic in the urban city and bring a greener transportation system.

In this white paper, the authors study pass-through of implicit taxes and subsidies, introduced by federal and state policies, to a variety of diesel and soy biodiesel fuel prices in the context of the U.S. diesel sector, focusing on fossil diesel and soy biodiesel.

This study leverages the 2018 California Panel Study of Emerging Transportation Trends to analyze the factors that influence consumer decisions to purchase different merchandise online.

This study conducted a review of the potential impacts of automated technologies in the freight sector, with a particular emphasis on driving occupations. This work also recommends policy strategies to aid workers impacted by automation.

This research assessed the changes in Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) service configurations by reviewing the pre-pandemic vs. during-pandemic General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) files.

This research project proposes three different solution approaches for solving the ride share routing problem with flexible pickup and drop-off points. Results show that the approaches are efficient, solving instances with up to 300 nodes within 130 CPU seconds. The methodologies in this study can help transportation planners design more efficient rideshare systems with less waiting, better passenger service, and less travel time.

Sidewalk infrastructure presence is a key indicator of pedestrian safety and walkability for neighborhoods in cities throughout the United States. This work refines prior sidewalk infrastructure network generation techniques, contributing new methods to identify sidewalk infrastructure presence.

This white paper assesses how cities are modifying transportation impact fees in response to Senate Bill (SB) 743, adopted in 2013 to orient environmental review of transportation impacts of development projects and plans in California to support sustainable development.

This study aims to dive deeper into understanding how people travel and their perceptions and opinions about various components of travel in a majority rural state. By speaking directly with Vermonters through in-person interviews, the authors obtain uniquely personal points of view and analyze them for commonalities and differences between urban, suburban, and rural Vermonters.

The growth of urban e-commerce has had enormous impacts on urban transportation and land use. However, there remain questions regarding the overall impact of online shopping on passenger travel and vehicle miles traveled (VMT). This project focuses on how delivery preferences affect individual travel behavior in California and the Greater Los Angeles Region.

In this dissertation, an optimal framework is introduced to find out the best PEV charging/discharging strategy using microgrids that includes all the Distributed Energy Resources present in a typical modern building microgrid.

The proliferation of digital devices and online services over the past decades has changed how people travel, enabling new mobility options and offering greater opportunities for e-commerce and telework. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers modified their plan to understand new trends, such as increased remote work, online/virtual meetings, and e-shopping, as well as changes in travel.

This study investigates the disruptive changes brought to transportation by emerging technologies and the COVID-19 pandemic through the analysis of repeated cross-sectional datasets that were collected with multiple survey waves administered in various regions of the United States and Canada.