Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley

This document is based on a set of lecture notes prepared in 2007-2010 for a University of California, Berkeley graduate course, Public Transportation Systems, a course targeted to first year graduate students with diverse academic backgrounds. Systems are examined in order of increased complexity so that generic insights evident in simple systems can be put to use as knowledge building blocks for the study of more complex systems. The document is organized in eight modules: five on planning (general, shuttle systems, corridors, two dimensional systems, and unconventional transit); two on management (vehicles and employees); and one on operations (how to stay on schedule).

The Course Notes for a graduate-level course in Public Transportation include seven homework exercises and three mini-projects. Homework topics include optimization, point-to-point travel, congestion relief, designing a feeder bus system, demand-responsive transit, and bus pairings. The mini-projects involve bus rapid transit, designing a transit network, and bus and driver assignment.

This syllabus serves as an introduction to the field of traffic engineering to professionals who are being assigned traffic engineering tasks for the first time and as a source of recent information for those already in the field. It is designed mainly for one-week short courses, but past editions have also seen increasing use in university engineering courses and for individual study. Traffic engineering is an ever-changing profession. New standards, guidelines, and basic texts rapidly replace older reference volumes. This 16th edition again includes new and revised material needed by students and practicing engineers. We have recognized the growing interest in non-motorized transportation modes by adding a new chapter on Bicycle Characteristics and Facilities and vastly expanding the chapter on Pedestrian Mobility and have also added a chapter on Work Zone Traffic Control. We have  invited  guest  contributors  to  write  these  chapters  and  others  to revise other material. On the other hand we have deleted the chapter on Mass Transit Systems, retaining a few items of specific concern to the traffic engineer elsewhere in the syllabus.

These problem sets comprise a supplement to Fundamentals of Transportation and Traffic Operations (C. Daganzo, Pergamon, 1997). Academicians can also obtain a companion set of solutions by writing to "Institute of Transportation Studies, Publications Office, 109 McLaughlin Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720" or by sending e-mail to its@its.berkeley.edu.

Although we lack a complete theory of the motion of individual cars, there are many simple facts that even the most inexperienced driver knows and there are others which we could determine through experiment if we thought these facts were worth the effort required to find them. The lack of such a theory however, should not deter us from constructing a framework of possible theories consistent with what is known and seeing if such an incomplete theory can give any useful information about the gross aspects of traffic.

In the fall of 1966 a short course on ’’Urban Mass Transit Planning” was developed by the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn with the assistance of the New York State Science and Technology Foundation and the cooperation of the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads. The course was presented both by the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn and by the Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering, University of California, and University of California Extension, in Asilomar, Calif.

A set of course notes was written for that offering and reproduced in limited quantity. Presented herein is an expansion and revision of the original notes, intended to provide background material, particularly for use in graduate courses and extension conferences.