http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification 720 https://escholarship.org/uc/uctc_dissertations/rss Recent eScholarship items from Dissertations Fri, 15 May 2026 06:07:53 +0000 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7nq9p0cv Incorporating the Influence of Latent Modal Preferences in Travel Demand Models https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7nq9p0cv Fri, 20 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Vij, Akshay https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1tf5v738 Examining the Cycle: How Perceived and Actual Bicycling Risk Influence Cylcing Frequency, Roadway Design Preferences, and Support for Cycling Among Bay Area Residents https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1tf5v738 Fri, 20 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Sanders, Rebecca L https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0cm3b1gq Integration Of Locational Decisions with the Household Activity Pattern Problem and Its Applications in Transportation Sustainability https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0cm3b1gq Fri, 20 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Kang, Jee E https://escholarship.org/uc/item/936337w5 <p>In India, demand for urban mobility is increasing rapidly because of growth in urban</p><p>populations, establishment of multiple employment sub-centers, suburbanization of households,better education, higher workforce participation rates, and rising incomes. An increase in discretionary spending is leading to higher household transportation budgets. Middle-income households in particular are investing in private vehicles such as motorized two-wheelers (TWs)</p><p>and cars. At the same time, policies to reduce vehicle ownership through regulations and user</p><p>costs remain underdeveloped and weakly enforced. This further increases households’</p><p>willingness to use vehicles, especially for non-discretionary work trips. Higher private vehicle</p><p>use is affecting other quality of life issues such as time spent commuting, accident rates, noise</p><p>pollution, and particulate and greenhouse gas emissions.</p><p>In part, this higher vehicle ownership and use is driven by... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/936337w5 Mon, 7 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Shirgaokar, Manish https://escholarship.org/uc/item/67d5w48s <p>Transportation planning research addresses accessibility from diverse approaches, focusing varyingly on the usability of the transportation system as a whole, a particular mode, the pattern of land uses, or the wherewithal of individuals and communities to make use of those systems. One aspect of accessibility that has received relatively little attention from planners is its cognitive, experiential aspect. Individuals’ activity and travel choices require not just money and time but also information about opportunities in the city. This component of an individual’s accessibility is highly personal but also dependent on the terrain of land uses and transportation options shaped by planners and policymakers. I seek to extend current accessibility research, addressing shortcomings in how the literature deals with individual experience of the city and knowledge. Through a series of empirical analyses of activity patterns and cognitive maps of the Los Angeles region, I explore the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/67d5w48s Mon, 7 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Mondschein, Andrew Samuel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4hf3b46g <p>Mexico City is a suburban metropolis, yet most of its suburbs would be unfamiliar to urbanists accustomed to thinking about US metropolitan regions. Mexico City’s suburbs are densely populated—not thinly settled—and its residents rely primarily on informal transit rather than privately-owned automobiles for their daily transportation. These types of dense and transitdependent suburbs have emerged as the fastest-growing form of human settlement in cities throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Wealthier and at a later stage in its economic development than other developing-world metropolises, Mexico City is a compelling place to investigate the effects of rising incomes, increased car ownership, and transit investments in the dense, peripheral areas that have grown rapidly around informal transit in the past decades, and is a bellwether for cities like Dakar, Cairo, Lima, and Jakarta.</p><p>I begin this dissertation with a historical overview of the demographic, economic,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4hf3b46g Mon, 7 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Guerra, Erick Strom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sb124zz <p>This dissertation focuses on the integration of the Household Activity Pattern Problem (HAPP) with various locational decisions considering both supply and demand sides. We present several methods to merge these two distinct areas—transportation infrastructure and travel demand procedures—into an integrated framework that has been previously exogenously linked by feedback or equilibrium processes. From the demand side, travel demand for non-primary activities is derived from the destination choices that a traveler makes that minimizes travel disutility within the context of considerations of daily scheduling and routing. From the supply side, the network decisions are determined as an integral function of travel demand rather than a given fixed OD matrix.</p><p>First, the Location Selection Problem for the Household Activity Pattern Problem (LSP-HAPP) is developed. LSP-HAPP extends the HAPP by adding the capability to make destination choices simultaneously with other travel... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sb124zz Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Kang, Jee Eun https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ng2z24q <p>Latent modal preferences, or modality styles, are defined as behavioral predispositions towards a certain travel mode or set of travel modes that an individual habitually uses. They are reflective of higher-level orientations, or lifestyles, that are hypothesized to influence all dimensions of an individual’s travel and activity behavior. For example, in the context of travel mode choice different modality styles may be characterized by the set of travel modes that an individual might consider when deciding how to travel, her sensitivity, or lack thereof, to different level-of-service attributes of the transportation (and land use) system when making that decision, and the socioeconomic characteristics that predispose her one way or another. Travel demand models currently in practice assume that individuals are aware of the full range of alternatives at their disposal, and that a conscious choice is made based on a tradeoff between perceived costs and benefits associated with... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ng2z24q Fri, 30 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Vij, Akshay https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6ct7x8hp <p>This dissertation investigates the connection between perceived and actual bicycling risk, andhow they both affect and are affected by one’s attitudes, knowledge, behavior, and experiences. Understanding bicycling risk has gained importance as efforts by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control &amp; Prevention, and others have urged communities to increase cycling for its health, environmental, and social equity benefits. Research has identified numerous barriers to increased bicycling in the U.S., including topography, weather, and trip distance, but the barrier that appears most consistently between studies is the perceived hazard associated with cycling near motorists. Yet, little research has fully explored the concept of risk to understand its component parts, including how 1) various driver actions affect perceived and actual cycling risk, 2) reported crash statistics reflect perceived and actual risk,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6ct7x8hp Fri, 30 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Sanders, Rebecca Lauren https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7014d9cg <p>Transportation planning research addresses accessibility from diverse approaches, focusing varyingly on the usability of the transportation system as a whole, a particular mode, the pattern of land uses, or the wherewithal of individuals and communities to make use of those systems. One aspect of accessibility that has received relatively little attention from planners is its cognitive, experiential aspect. Individuals’ activity and travel choices require not just money and time but also information about opportunities in the city. This component of an individual’s accessibility is highly personal but also dependent on the terrain of land uses and transportation options shaped by planners and policymakers. I seek to extend current accessibility research, addressing shortcomings in how the literature deals with individual experience of the city and knowledge. Through a series of empirical analyses of activity patterns and cognitive maps of theLos Angeles region, I explore the... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7014d9cg Tue, 27 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Mondschein, Andrew Samuel https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9pp8j3km Social networks are ubiquitous in the mobile information society of the present day. Here the focus is on social networks that depend on the physical and virtual locations of their users in order to provide various services. In these contemporary social networks both virtual and physical presence is a requirement. This research examines travel behavior using an Internet-based website, CouchSurfing, which provides free lodging with local residents. Increases in computing power and accessibility have led to novel e-travel techniques and the users of such systems utilize an amalgamation of social networks, transportation networks, and data communication networks. Thus the focus is on how the geographical spread of people in a modern, digital social network influences the travel choices of each individual in the network. In this dissertation a general model is presented that describes traveler behavior using a cost-free lodging network. Also presented for this type of travel behavior... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9pp8j3km Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Pultar, Edward https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91d129r7 This dissertation describes a strategy which makes all commuters better off (i.e. a Pareto effecient strategy) for the time-dependent morning commute problem, even if the collected revenues are not returned to the population of commuters. The proposed strategy will apply road pricing as a tool for congestion management, a practice usually called congestion pricing.  https://escholarship.org/uc/item/91d129r7 Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Garcia, Reinaldo Crispiniano https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9140d366 The major goal of travel behavior research is to understand and model the processes by which people make decisions regarding activities and travel. These decisions, including whether, when, where, and with whom to participate in particular activities, and the choice of mode and route, are collectively known as activity scheduling decisions. Traditionally the research focus has been on how these decisions are made, how they relate to demographic and environmental factors, and, to a lesser extent, how they interact with each other. A rich body of knowledge, increasingly useful for forecasting behavioral responses to a wide range of transportation and other policies, is already part of this tradition. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9140d366 Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Venter, Christoffel Jacobus https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xk3c9z7 Planners and others have proposed developing high-density residential nodes around transit stations to reduce auto dependence and encourage transit use. Such nodes, the argument goes, would provide more patrons for the transit system, more shoppers for nearby stores, and more of a community for the residents. However, such high-density housing runs counter to the assumed American preference for low-density, detached homes. This study investigates the relationship between residential density and housing satisfaction. It also examines the extent to which other factors, such as proximity of the residential development to transit and respondent background variables, influence thier relationship.  https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xk3c9z7 Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Shaw, John Gordon https://escholarship.org/uc/item/85c2r37x One of the most pressing and pervasive problems facing contemporary American society concerns the alarmingly high rates of joblessness suffered by inner-city African-American youth. Rates of black youth unemployment and joblesness far exceed those of white youth. For the year 1995, the unemployment rate for black youth workers between 16 and 19 years of age approximately 37 percent for young black men and 34 percent for young black women. Furthermore, the rate of joblesness stood at 75 percent for black male youth and 74 percent for black female youth. In contrast, the comparable unemployment rates for white male and white female youth were 15 and 13 percent, respectively, while the corresponding rates of joblessness were 49 and 48 percent. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/85c2r37x Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Raphael, Steven Paul https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xh8f25t Explosive suburban employment growth, broad processes of economic restructuring, and rapid developments in transportation and telecommunications technologies have fundamentally altered the spatial and organizational composition of both where we work and where we live. How have these broad spatial processes impacted intra-metropolitan accessibility? The research presents an analytical framework for evaluating and monitoring intra-metropolitan accessibility to employment opportunities. More specifically, it (1) determines how accessibility has been defined, modeled, measured, and interpreted: (2) presents a new approach for evaluating intra-metropolitan accessibility founded on the Couclelis proximal space construct, the Getis/Ord G* spatial statistic, a level-of-service definition of accessibility, multiple scale analysis, and a multi-dimensional conceptualization of accessibility processes: and (3) applies this analytical framework, implemented within a GIS environment, to employment... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xh8f25t Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Scott, Lauren M. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6dv0z95g Thirty years ago scholars first presented convincing evidence that local officialsuse biased travel demand forecasts to justify decisions based on unstated considerations.Since then, a number of researchers have demonstrated convincingly that such forecastsare systematically optimistic–often wildly so–for reasons that cannot be explained solelyby the inherent difficulty of predicting the future. Why do modelers–professional engineers and planners who use quantitative techniques to predict future demand for traveland estimate its potential impact on built and proposed transportation facilities–generatebiased forecasts and otherwise tolerate the misuse of their work? On initial consideration, it is tempting to surmise that corrupt modelers are responsible for biased forecasting.Indeed, corruption is the most common explanation of forecasting bias and tales of mercenary behavior are all too common in the field. Data from in-depth interviews withtwenty-nine travel demand forecasters... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6dv0z95g Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Brinkman, P. Anthony https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6cc6478q <p>This dissertation examines the role that finance plays in shaping transportation planning and policy making and concludes that the key to understanding the development of metropolitan transportation systems is found in the political negotiation and compromises made to secure public investment in those systems. The particular circumstances leading to or preventing a tax increase of appropriation for a program or project explains most of the success or failure of that program or project. Three cases from California are examined: (1) the planning and finance of urban freeways prior to 1960, (2) the shift from "freeway-first" to "multi-modal" urban transportation policies after 1960, and (3) the development of state subsidies of public transit after 1970. Each of these cases is a significant chapter in the transportation history of California and each will show that the goals of the rational planning model have largely gone unfulfilled; in each case, the politics of finance superseded... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6cc6478q Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Taylor, Brian Deane https://escholarship.org/uc/item/69m1s4gt <p>This dissertation examines why and how jurisdictions choose to finance theirroads. The systematic causes ofrevenue choice are explored qualitatively by examining the history of turn pikes. The question is approached analytically by employing game theory tomodel revenue choice on a long road. The road is covered by a series of jurisdictions seeking to maximize local welfare. Jurisdictions are responsible for building andmaintaining the local network. Complexity arises because local network usersmay not be localresidents, and localresidentsmay use non-local networks. Key factors posited to explain the choice of revenue mechanism include the length oftrips using the road, the size ofthe governing jurisdiction, the degree of excludability, and the transaction costs oftoll collection. These factors dictate the size and scope of the free rider problem. It is hypothesized thatsmaller jurisdictions and lower collection costsfavortolling policies overtaxes. The analyticalmodel is operationalized... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/69m1s4gt Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Levinson, David Matthew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5z99p647 <p>Federal and state governments are funding formulas to apportion, or geographically distribute, billions of dollars of expenditures for transportation programs every year. Past studies sugest that successful targeting of such funding results in fairness toward all areas while lack of targeting results in favoritism toward some area over others. </p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5z99p647 Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Lem, Lewison Lee https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4ph4688x The goal of this dissertation is to develop an activity-based trip generation modle which addresses shortcomings of the conventional generation models resulted from a fundamental incapability to address the temporal and spatial characteristics of activities and the trips which they generated. The sequencing and scheduling of trips and activities, and interactions between household members, are ignored in the standard model. The proposed activity-based generation model was developed to estimate trip production from the analysis of complete travel/activity patterns. This approach classifies travel patterns with respect to activity, spacial, and temporal characteristics; standard trip rates can be also estimated from these representative activity patterns. In addition to a standard category prodcution model, a stochastic logic-based pattern choice model and a deterministic discriminant analysis model were developed to stimulate activity pattern choice and the associated trip production... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4ph4688x Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Wang, Ruey-Min https://escholarship.org/uc/item/23d3c7kx This dissertation asks what role local public agencies might play in regional economic development through the market-shaping institutions they create and sustain. Recent economic geography literature has sought to account for patterns of regional development in terms of institutional differences across space. Research has sought to identify and understand these institutions, defined as taken for granted formal and informal rules, practices, norms and patterns of behavior. However, the current literature is vague about the role of public policy, and often ignores extra-regional economic forces.  https://escholarship.org/uc/item/23d3c7kx Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Hall, Peter Voss https://escholarship.org/uc/item/17r4d88f In this study, potential vehicle manufacturing costs, lifecycle costs, infrastructure support costs, and emission-related costs are compared for three potential zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) technology development and deployment scenarios. These scenarios include production of mid-sized battery electric vehicles direct-hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and direct methanol fuel cell vehicles from 2003 to 2026, and operation of the vehicles in California's South Coast Air Basin (SCAB) from 2003 to 2043. The study focuses on potential manufacturing cost reductions for electric motors, motor controllers, battery systems, hydrogen storage tanks, and fuel cell systems, due to the combined forces of production scale economies and technological progress. Vehicle manufacturing and lifecycle costs are calculated by integrating vehicle component cost functions with a detailed vehicle performance and cost spreadsheet model. Fleet-level costs for vehicle operation, infrastructure development, and... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/17r4d88f Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Lipman, Timothy Edward https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0rj9z9cv <p>Unreliable travel time is defined to mean a distribution of possible commute durations. This dissertation identifies occupational groups and shows how an individual's occupation can be expected to indicate how that person is going to behave in risky commuting stations. Individual occupations attract a certain personality type. Also, individual occupations require different amounts of team work and pose idiosyncratic supervisory requirements for the employer. These effects create systematic variations among employer imposed work rules concerning employee's time use and employee expectations and reactions to the rules. The outcome is both personality driven and situation specific response to risky commuting situations. A psychological construct -- locus of control -- draws a boundary between what an individual believes is influenced by her own actions and what is caused by factors external to her. A person with an internal locus of control is optimistic about her possibilities... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0rj9z9cv Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Koskenoja, Pia Maria K. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/06x0k5r4 Modeling personal travel behavior is complex, particularly when one tries to adhere closely to actual casual mechanisms while predicting human response to changes in the transport environement. There has long been a need for explicitly modeling the underlying determinant of travel- the demand for participation in out-of-home activities; and progress is being made in this area, primarily through discrete-choice models coupled with continous-duration choices. However, these models tend to be restircted in size and conditional on a wide variety of other choices that could be modeled more endogenously.  https://escholarship.org/uc/item/06x0k5r4 Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Kockelman, Kara Maria https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gs0t2f9 <p>To operate, guide and control vehicles in low visibility conditions, it is critical that the states of the vehicle are accurately estimated, which includes the three dimensiona position, velocity, and attitude. This can be accomplished by GPS (Global Positioning System) aided encoder or GPS aided inertial approaches. The overall positioning accuracy of either approach will be determined by the GPS performance. Real-time centimeter accuracy GPS positioning can be achieved using carrier phase measurements. This requires fast and reliable on-the-°y integer ambiguity resolution.</p><p>In this dissertation, we focus on resolving GPS ambiguity problem, including both integer ambiguity estimation and integer ambiguity validation. For integer ambiguity esti- mation, a brief overview of pervious work on integer ambiguity resolution is ¯rst presented. Then, an improved integer ambiguity resolution method is proposed. Subsequently, simu-lations and real-world data are presented to demonstrate... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9gs0t2f9 Fri, 31 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Chen, Anning https://escholarship.org/uc/item/07x7h9pg Allocation of Space and the Costs of Multimodal Transport in Cities https://escholarship.org/uc/item/07x7h9pg Fri, 31 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Gonzales, Eric Justin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/88t7k9p5 <p>Mexico City is a suburban metropolis, yet most of its suburbs would be unfamiliar to urbanists accustomed to thinking about US metropolitan regions. Mexico City’s suburbs are densely populated—not thinly settled—and its residents rely primarily on informal transit rather than privately-owned automobiles for their daily transportation. These types of dense and transit-dependent suburbs have emerged as the fastest-growing form of human settlement in cities throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Wealthier and at a later stage in its economic development than other developing-world metropolises, Mexico City is a compelling place to investigate the effects of rising incomes, increased car ownership, and transit investments in the dense, peripheral areas that have grown rapidly around informal transit in the past decades, and is a bellwether for cities like Dakar, Cairo, Lima, and Jakarta.</p><p>I begin this dissertation with a historical overview of the demographic, economic,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/88t7k9p5 Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 Guerra, Erick Strom https://escholarship.org/uc/item/49r880kj <p>Although it is generally believed that people drive less carefully when their vehicles are equipped with new protection systems, the possible impact of such behavior on fatalities has never before been quantified. A meta-study across a diverse set of injury protection systems strongly suggests that users do adapt to new protection systems in a way that increases fatalities, and that the effect is more intense for systems that are easily perceived by the user. Perceptibility was quantified and found to be higher for injury protection systems that require user activation; for these systems, it is estimated that about 9% of the fatalities can be attributed to adaptation.</p> https://escholarship.org/uc/item/49r880kj Wed, 1 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 Grembek, Offer https://escholarship.org/uc/item/06v2g6dh <p>In the two decades since the United States Congress passed the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, there has been a surge of interest in making urban transportation systems more sustainable. Many agencies, representing all levels of government, have searched for strategies to reduce private automobile use, including policies to shift local driving to pedestrian and bicycle modes. Progress has been made in a number of communities, but the automobile remains the dominant mode of transportation in all metropolitan regions.</p><p>Sustainable transportation advocates are especially interested in routine travel, such as shopping and other errands, because it tends to be done frequently and for distances that could be covered realistically by walking or bicycling. According to the 2009 National Household Travel Survey, Americans made more trips for shopping than for any other purpose, including commuting to and from work. One-third of these shopping trips were... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/06v2g6dh Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 Schneider, Robert James https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nd315bv <p>Urban planners are increasingly concerned about the sprawling suburban development in metropolitan areas around the world, which they often blame for growing traffic congestion and excessive highway investment needs. This dissertation seeks to shed light on this issue by studying the relationship between morning commute congestion and urban form.</p><p>The causes and consequences of traffic congestion have been extensively studied in the economics and engineering literatures. Unfortunately, most conclusions have been drawn from very idealized models, which either fail to consider adequately the spatial nature of congestion, by neglecting the effects of physical queues and merging interactions, or overlook dynamic aspects, such as commuters’ departure time adaptation during the rush-hour.</p><p>To better capture the spatial-dynamic nature of morning commute traffic, this dissertation proposes a new analytical framework that explicitly incorporates spatially distributed commuter... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nd315bv Fri, 5 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Lago, Alejandro https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92x23786 <p>Commercial vehicles typically represent a small fraction of vehicular traffic on most roadways. However, their influence on the economy, environment, traffic performance, infrastructure, and safety are much more significant than their diminutive numerical presence suggests.</p><p>This dissertation describes the development and prototype implementation of a new highfidelity inductive loop sensor and a ground-breaking commercial vehicle classification system based on the vehicle inductive signatures obtained from this sensor technology. This new sensor technology is relatively easy to install and has the potential to yield reliable and highly detailed vehicle inductive signatures for advanced traffic surveillance applications.</p><p>The Speed PRofile INterpolation Temporal-Spatial (SPRINTS) transformation model developed in this dissertation improves vehicle signature data quality under adverse traffic conditions where acceleration and deceleration effects can distort inductive... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/92x23786 Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Tok, Yeow Chern Andre https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7sn272sc <p>This dissertation outlines three topics on urban transportation energy, emphasizing the role of transportation energy policy, and aims to provide a single comprehensive framework to evaluate and compare different pricing and regulatory policy options for reducing transportation fuel consumption in the United States.</p><p>In the first chapter, I examine the effect of population density on motor fuel (i.e., highway gasoline) consumption, controlling for other variables such as gas price, income, vehicle stock and so on, using state level aggregate cross-sectional time series data from 1966 to 2004. By estimating the impact of density on fuel consumption, I improve the understanding of the conventional logic that there is a negative correlation between population density and transportation energy use due to reduced average travel distance and availability of alternative modes in denser area.</p><p>In the second part, I examine various transportation energy policy instruments... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7sn272sc Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Kim, Chun Kon https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zc5j8xg <p>The tendency of buses to bunch is a problem that was defined almost 50 years ago. Since then, there has been a significant amount of work done on the problem; however, the tendency of the current literature is either to only focus on the surface causes or to rely on simulation to create results instead of model formulation. With GPS installed on many buses throughout the world, the data is only being used for monitoring and informing the user. This research proposes a new approach to solving the problem that uses the GPS data to directly counteract the cause of the bunching by allowing the buses to cooperate with each other and determine their speed based on relative position. A continuum approximation model is presented as a tool to systematically analyze the behavior of the system and test the proposed control. In order to validate the model and the control, a simulation tool is used to model the system in a more realistic, discrete way. The control is shown to produce bounded... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zc5j8xg Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Pilachowski, Joshua Michael https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5vw10860 <p>Many studies have examined the impact that the built environment has on physical activity. However, most have used cross-sectional methods which have allowed them to establish correlations but not behavioral causality. This research first uses a longitudinal design to perform a pilot study evaluating the impact neighborhood trail development has on active travel behavior and overall physical activity. A sample of suburban residents in West Valley City, Utah were surveyed both before and after the construction of a class-one trail in their neighborhood. Data collection methods include various individual and household surveys, as well as individual single-day fully annotated activity diaries completed at three pre-assigned time points before and after the trail's construction. Secondly, this research analyzes the suitability of the methods employed in the pilot study and provides a framework for future evaluations of built environment interventions. The pilot study found that... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5vw10860 Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Burbidge, Shaunna Kay https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gd206wv <p>Automobiles impose considerable public costs in the form of emissions and foreign oil dependence. Public policy has thus taken a considerable interest in influencing the technology and fuel economy associated with new vehicles brought to market. In spite of this interest, there is very limited information on the effectiveness of these policies in reducing greenhouse gas emissions or shifting vehicle demands. This is in part due to the fact that modeling the demand for automobiles is wrought with many challenges. These include large choice sets that change frequently over time and significant data collection obstacles. This work proposes a methodology for data development that simplifies many of the challenges associated with data collection in automotive modeling. The methodology explores a technique to merge data on aggregate sales with disaggregate vehicle holdings data to synthesize a complete dataset that preserves the strengths of both. The merged dataset is used to estimate... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gd206wv Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Martin, Elliott William https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5730f1d2 <p>Efficient fright transportation is essential for a strong economic system. Increases in demands for freight transportation, however, lessens the efficiency of existing infrastructure. In order to alleviate this problem effectively, evaluation studies must be performed in order to invest limited resources for maximum social benefits. In addition to many difficulties related to evaluating individual projects, complimentary and substitution effects that occur when considering transportation projects together must be properly accounted for. Current practices, however, limit the number of projects that can feasibly be considered at one time.</p><p>This dissertation proposes network design models which can automatically create project combinations and search for the best of these. Network design models have been studied for the passenger movements and focus on highway expansions. In this dissertation, the focus is shifted to freight movements which involve multimodal transportation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5730f1d2 Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Apivatanagul, Pruttipong https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5257005q <p>The city evacuation problem is analyzed physically at the freeway and network levels. On a freeway, a macroscopic approach is used to identify the critical bottlenecks that determine the system’s evacuation capacity. Knowledge of these bottlenecks leads to the development of an input control strategy that maximizes exit flows at all times, effectively minimizing total evacuation time. The optimality results are true for the complete system and for “population nests”. The strategy, called innermost first out (InFO), has many other benefits: it is decentralized, adaptive and robust. Additionally, since the strategy gives priority to upstream, most-at-risk residents, InFO is likely to be socially acceptable. Finally, relaxed versions of the strategy exist, giving flexibility to freeway evacuation management.</p><p>At the network level, a tree-shaped topology allows for similar results to be obtained. Specifically, a tree-based innermost first out (T-InFO) strategy is developed,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5257005q Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 So, Stella Kin-Mang https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4913331c <p>The activity-based travel demand model recognizes that travel is derived from the demand for activity participation distributed in space and time. The focus on intrahousehold interactions and linkages between people’s behavior and social and physical environment has been identified as emerging features of the activity-based approach that would be important to travel behavior research. The dissertation is dedicated to an indepth exploration of the within-household interactions by theoretical specification and empirical development of the household activity time allocation models based on a utility maximization framework with the household as the unit of analysis. Furthermore, the dissertation also aims to propose a model of the household activity scheduling process primarily focusing on task allocation mechanisms on the basis of the human agents adjusting themselves to the built social and physical environment.</p><p>Development of the activity time allocation model in this... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4913331c Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Kim, Hee-Kyung https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40p4m581 <p>Traffic congestion is a substantial time cost for many urban commuters. This dissertation first studies the response of subjects in experimental settings in which subjects choose between a short direct route that becomes increasingly congested as more people travel on it and a more indirect route that does not become congested. More specifically, I investigate three different toll implementations. Consistent with previous experiments, my first toll design imposes monetized homogeneous time costs. Within this framework the implementation of a toll comes very close to achieving the efficient use of the travel network predicted by theory. Two other toll designs implement heterogeneity in the subject pool. In the first design, I implement a design that more closely simulates boring commutes by forcing subjects to sit and wait for a period of time after the experiment where the length of time they have to wait is an increasing function of experimental travel time. Paying the toll... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/40p4m581 Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Hartman, John Lawrence https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2w49616b <p>Since passage of the 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), U.S. transportation policy has gradually strengthened metropolitan authority over federal transportation investments. Federal law requires metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs)—composed of local elected officials, transportation agency leaders, and public stakeholders—to plan and program federally funded improvements in urban regions. Yet members of the U.S. Congress have increasingly used funding bills to “earmark” funds to specific transportation projects. Derogatively called pork barreling, the practice can transfer discretion over transportation finance from metropolitan officials to members of Congress, who may hand-pick projects for funding whether or not they reflect regional transportation needs or priorities articulated in their MPOs’ long range plans (LRPs) or transportation improvement programs (TIPs).</p><p>This dissertation maps how Congressional earmarking of federal funds... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2w49616b Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Sciara, Gian-Claudia https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19034785 <p>Over the past two decades, the spatial development patterns of city-regions have increasingly been shaped by global-scale centripetal and centrifugal market forces. Complex managerial tasks and specialized producer services agglomerate in the central locations of global city-regions, whereas standardized assemble lines, wholesale inventories, and customer services stretch over the peripheral locations of global production networks. One explanation for postindustrial agglomeration is the need for face-to-face interactions and knowledge spillovers among the labor-intensive business sectors. On the other hand, the spatial concentrations of knowledge-based activities are also promoted by entrepreneurial city-states’ economic development strategies. Since the 1990s, rail transit investments and urban regeneration projects have played a pivotal role in shaping competitive and livable global centers to attract foreign direct investments and qualified international workers. Despite... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/19034785 Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 Murakami, Jin https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0tx230gc <p>Transportation planning has long focused on large scale projects using a civil engineering approach of maximizing throughput and minimizing interactions with the surrounding environment. Such efforts greatly increased the overall mobility and accessibility of individuals within and across metropolitan regions, but it is clear that in the future such enormous initiatives are unrealistic due to political, financial, spatial and social concerns. The field of transportation planning is shifting away from this old model of planning towards one where transportation systems are considered part of the overall quality of life of communities.</p><p>This dissertation explores how local transportation planning is adapting to these changing dynamics of transportation planning through three essays. The first considers how cities are already planning for transportation through their general plans without strong mandates from regional governments. The second essay estimates the spatial variation... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0tx230gc Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 King, David Andrew https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5zr22745 <p>People with mobility impairments, especially those using wheelchairs, depend on accessibility information for successful travel planning. Mainstream travel information sources, however, do not sufficiently provide this. With the goal of working towards a standard for presenting access-specific information, this dissertation explores the question “How do wheelchair users utilize accessibility information during trip planning, and which information sources are most valuable to them?"</p><p>To answer this and develop a theoretical framework, two methodologies are applied: an online survey and a human subjects experiment. For the online survey, intermediary agencies were contacted nation-wide and convenience sampling obtained through networking. During the experiment, twenty wheelchair users from the local community evaluated route accessibility based on supplementary access information provided prior to travel. Access information about potential barriers was provided using map... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5zr22745 Tue, 6 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Nuernberger, Andrea https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2w55c9gs <p>With soaring oil prices and growing concerns for global warming, there is increasing interest in the environmental performance of transportation systems. This dissertation contributes to this growing literature through three independent yet related projects essays that deal with transportation technology, infrastructure, and policy.</p><p>My first essay analyzes the increasing interest for hybrid cars by Californians based on a statewide phone survey conducted in July of 2004 by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) using discrete choice models. Results suggest that the possibility for single drivers to use hybrid vehicles in HOV lanes is more important than short term concerns for air pollution, support for energy efficiency policies, long term concerns for global warming, education, and income. This suggests that programs designed to improve the environmental performance of individual vehicles need to rely on tangible benefits for drivers; to make a difference,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2w55c9gs Fri, 2 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Sangkapichai, Mana https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2k44c9tx <p>The main goal of this dissertation is to propose a new analytical framework and supporting optimization models that will encourage the aviation industry to incorporate alternative transportation modes when major airports in the system encounter temporary closures or severe capacity deficiencies. This framework can provide a way to reduce passenger disutility due to delay and misconnection, to help airlines reduce operating cost and recover schedule more promptly, and to assist air traffic flow managers to utilize and distribute scarce resources more efficiently and equitably.</p><p>Airline delays cost billions of dollars each year in the U.S. Most of the delays occur on days when airlines’ planned schedules are disrupted and off-schedule operations (OSO) have to be performed. One main reason for the disruptions is airspace capacity shortfall caused by adverse weather or other temporary events. It is suggested in this study that when there is a significant capacity shortfall,... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2k44c9tx Fri, 2 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Zhang, Yu https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d72371n <p>To date, traditional navigation systems have embedded algorithms that attempt to minimize trip distance and/or travel time. However, many drivers are now becoming increasingly concerned with fuel costs and vehicle emissions that are detrimental to the environment. Therefore, it is desirable to create new “environmentally-friendly” and “energy-friendly” navigation algorithms. Taking advantage of the latest navigation technology, in this dissertation, new navigation techniques have been developed that focus on minimizing energy consumption and vehicle emissions. These methods combine sophisticated mobile-source energy and emission models with route minimization algorithms that are used for navigational purposes. It is also known that different road types can play a significant role in emissions and fuel consumption. As such, a new standalone, high-accuracy road type classification methodology has been developed that only uses a short vehicle velocity trajectory as input, without... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8d72371n Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Zhu, Weihua https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hz4b9xj <p>Characteristics of the built environment, such as the mixture of land uses, transportation infrastructure, and neighborhood design, have often been associated with reduced automobile use and increased walking and transit use. However, a significant gap remains in our understanding of travel behavior, especially with respect with social environmental and attitudinal factors influencing travel, such as crime rates and the perceptions of walking. This dissertation, comprised of four empirical essays, explores the complex relationships between the built and social environment and neighborhood travel by focusing on non-work travel for individuals sampled from eight communities in the South Bay Area of Los Angeles County.</p><p>In the first essay, I examine claims made by proponents of New Urbanism that traditional neighborhood designs promote walking and discourage driving by comparing automobile and walking trip rates for mixed-use centers and auto-oriented corridors. The results... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hz4b9xj Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Joh, Kenneth https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b75k2nf <p>Insuring the City examines the development of the Prudential Center in Boston as a case study of the organizational, financial, and spatial forces that large insurance companies wielded in shaping the postwar American city. The Prudential Center was one of seven Regional Home Offices (RHOs) planned by Prudential in the 1950s to decentralize its management. What began as an effort to reinvigorate the company’s bureaucratic makeup evolved into a prominent building program and urban planning phenomenon, promoting the economic prospects of each RHO city and reshaping the geography of the business district. Examples from Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago show each RHO as a calculated real estate investment. The RHOs were also expressions of the insurance company’s self-image as a benevolent force in American cities and social life.</p><p>Boston—the location of Prudential’s Northeastern Home Office—was, like other American cities, preoccupied with urban obsolescence and erected a... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b75k2nf Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Rubin, Elihu James https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kj790ws <p>During the past decade, new sensing technologies, such as inductive loops, laser range scanners, radar detectors and computer vision sensors have been greatly enhanced and applied to the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) area. Among all these sensor systems, computer vision-based approaches are one of the most popular and promising techniques used in ITS for traffic evaluation and management, driver assistance, as well as other safety related research. This is primarily due to the advantages of easy maintenance, high flexibility, and low cost for traffic scene monitoring and analysis. Many stationary vision sensors have been already installed near the roadway, particularly at intersections. In addition, more and more vision sensors are now being installed on mobile vehicles, in order to have real time surrounding traffic information. This dissertation focuses on both mobile and stationary computer vision based traffic surveillance techniques, including the development... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kj790ws Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Cao, Meng https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1tn1m968 <p>Numerous theories on traffic have been developed as traffic congestion gains more and more interest in our daily life. To model traffic phenomena, many traffic theorists have adopted theories from other fields such as fluid mechanics and thermodynamics. However, their efforts to model the traffic at a microscopic level have not been successful yet. Therefore, to overcome the limitations of the existing theories we propose a microscopic asymmetric traffic theory based on analysis of individual vehicle trajectories. According to the proposed theory, vehicle traffic is classified into 5 phases: free flow, acceleration, deceleration, coasting, and stationary. The proposed theory suggests that traffic equilibrium exists as 2-dimensional area bounded by A-curve and D-curve, and explains phase transitions. The basic theory was extended to address driver behavior such as vehicle maneuvering error and anticipation. The proposed theory was applied to explain several traffic phenomena... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1tn1m968 Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Yeo, Hwasoo https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1hd7c0dv <p>Vehicle formation control is one of important research topics in transportation. Control of uncertain nonlinear systems is one of fundamental problems in vehicle control. In this dissertation, we consider this fundamental control problem. Specially, we considered selforganizing based tracking control of uncertain nonaffine systems and optimal control of uncertain nonlinear systems. In tracking control of nonaffine systems, a self-organizing online approximation based controller is proposed to achieve a prespecified tracking accuracy, without using high-gain control nor large magnitude switching. For optimal control of uncertain nonlinear systems, we considered point-wise min-norm optimal control of uncertain nonlinear systems and approximately optimal control of uncertain nonlinear systems. In point-wise non-norm optimal control, optimal regulation and optimal tracking controllers were proposed with the aid of locally weighted learning observers. By introducing control Lyapunov... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1hd7c0dv Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Dong, Wenjie https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0ct7c30p <p>The major purpose of this research is to test the effects of street-level urban design attributes on travel behavior. There are two goals: (1) operationalizing path walkability, which includes developing a walkability measurement instrument and quantifying path walkability, and (2) testing the effect of path walkability on transit users’ access mode choice and walking distance to the station.</p><p>A case study was conducted in the station area of Mountain View, California. In 2005, three different surveys were done. A station user survey was conducted by distributing self-administered, mail-back questionnaires to the entering transit users at the gates of the station. The user survey collected access mode choices, trip origins, and socio-economic data from 249 transit users who provided their routes. A walker perception survey was conducted with 68 transit users who walked to the station. This on-board survey asked them to score their walking routes. Based on the routes identified... https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0ct7c30p Thu, 1 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 Park, Sungjin