Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley

This white paper examines the successes and failures of road pricing strategies in California and the United States, with implications for congestion pricing across California. It evaluates nine case studies spanning feasibility studies, operational HOT lane programs, and the country's first large-scale cordon pricing zone. We address the conditions that favor pricing, barriers, outcomes, and how costs and benefits are distributed using case studies in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, San Mateo County, Alameda County, New York City, and Northern Virginia. We find that successful pricing programs have sustained political champions, state enabling legislation, and benefits visible to identifiable users. Revenue allocation, not toll structure, is the primary determinant of whether pricing is regressive or progressive. No pricing program reviewed was repealed after implementation. We conclude that advancing road pricing in California will require clear state leadership and supportive coalitions.

The Mobility 10x Summit convened more than 200 leaders from state agencies, regional governments, academia, and industry to accelerate California’s transition toward a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable transportation system. As the capstone event of the Resilient and Innovative Mobility Initiative (RIMI)—a four‐year UC ITS research effort launched in 2021—the summit synthesized extensive research and practitioner insights across ten priority transportation topics, ranging from public transit to automation and carbon-neutraltransportation to equity, safety, and resilience.Across the opening and closing plenary discussions and nine breakout sessions, participants examined the structural challenges facing California’s transportation system: declining gas tax revenues, climate‐driven infrastructure damage, uneven public transit ridership recovery, inequitable access to mobility options, and rapid technological change. These challenges are converging at a moment when California must simultaneously meet ambitious climate goals, modernize its transportation funding model, and ensure that mobility systems work for all communities.

The use of airport gate electrification infrastructure in the form of ground power (GP) and preconditioned air (PCA) systems can reduce energy and maintenance costs, emissions, and health risks by limiting the use of aircraft auxiliary power unit (APU) engines at the gate. However, their benefits can only be gained when they are actually being used; otherwise, pilots keep APUs on to fulfill their aircraft’s demands for electrical power and air conditioning. GP and PCA systems require a large initial infrastructure investment to increase energy efficiency, and they are installed with the assumption that they will be highly utilized. In this report, a method is developed to examine how much and why GP and PCA are not used to their full potential when they are readily available.

We study how political preferences shaped California’s High-Speed Rail (CHSR), a largetransportation project approved by referendum in 2008. Voters’ support responded significantly to the projected economic gains in their tract of residence, as measured by a quantitative model of high-speed rail matched to CHSR plans. Given this response, a revealed-preference approach comparing the proposed network with alternative designs identifies strong planner’s preferences for political support. The optimal politically-blind design would have placed the stations nearer to California’s dense metro areas, where it was harder to sway votes, thus increasing the projected economic gains.

Sidewalks and crosswalks serve little purpose for pedestrians if they are routinely obstructed by automobiles. In New York City, local journalists and transportation advocates have drawn attention to this occurring, particularly in certain settings.  Specifically, there is consistent photographic evidence that streets surrounding New York Police Department (hereafter, NYPD) offices are replete with cars parked on the sidewalk and within crosswalks. Though clearly problematic for pedestrians and abutting residents and local businesses, this type of parking behavior has not been studied systematically–both in terms of its  geographic extent, and how long it has occurred. This paper considers the intersection of two issues –parking and public-employee behavior –both of which have been considered at length by scholars separately. As to the former, there have been a number of studies documenting drivers parking in ways that violate established regulations. Indeed, drivers often avoid paying at parking meters (Petiot 2001), park on residential sidewalks (Shoup 2014), and in bike lanes (Moran 2020). It is perhaps not surprising that drivers behave in such ways, given so often there are few penalties for doing so. However, evidence that speeding and red-light cameras can reduce dangerous driving (Wilson et al. 2010; Graham et al. 2019; Bhat and Martinez 2022), indicate that increased enforcement could also decrease parking that obstructs pedestrian infrastructure.

The objectives of this study are to formulate policies and practices that can be used to identify place names that have derogatory or racist linkages and provide recommendations on how to rename or remove harmful names and monuments in the California transportation right of way (ROW). This study was requested by the California Department of Transportation and conducted through the University of California, Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies Technology Transfer Program.

This Preliminary Investigation document, on one hand, outlines challenges encountered by SB/DBEs in the process of getting certified, entering into a contract, executing on projects or delivering services, and sustaining or growing their business. On the other hand, it summarizes OCR’s current ongoing efforts that are aiming to expand contracting with SB/DBEs. Along the way it identifies opportunities that warrant more in-depth investigation for OCR to target its programming and resource allocation as it aims to reduce obstacles or otherwise improve the ability of SBs/DBEs to successfully contract with Caltrans.

Automated vehicle (AV) deployment can bring about transformational changes to transportation and society as a whole. The infrastructure owner-operators (IOOs), who own, maintain, and operate the infrastructure, have the opportunity to work jointly with the AV industry to provide safe and efficient operations. A key question for the IOOs is, “What transportation infrastructure improvements do AV manufacturers believe will facilitate and improve AV performance?” This study was designed to address this question through a comprehensive survey approach, including an online survey and follow-up interviews. A list of ten questions was discussed, covering the physical and digital infrastructure, infrastructure maintenance, standards and specifications, policy support, data sharing, and so forth. The researchers reached out to more than 60 entities who hold the AV testing permit in California. In total, 20 companies responded. They were from different sectors and well represented the AV industry. From the results of this study, it is concluded that the most important roadway characteristics that have the potential to benefit the automated driving system (ADS) are: (1) digital mapping and signage; (2) lane markings; (3) work zone and incident information; (4) vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications; (5) actual traffic signals; (6) general signage; and (7) lighting. The digital features considered most critical to help accelerate ADS deployment include work zone and road closure information, traffic signal phase and timing, and traffic congestion. This study provides diverse voices and in-depth insights into topics that the AV industry and IOOs should engage in to advance AVs’ deployment.

Marked crosswalks are the primary means of safeguarding pedestrian travel at intersections in American cities. In the face of decades-high pedestrian fatalities nationwide, the provision of adequate cross walks is highly salient. Though, how they are spatially distributed across an entire city, and vary by neighborhood, has drawn little academic scrutiny. Given that, this study utilizes satellite imagery to map the presence of marked crosswalks throughout San Francisco, a dense, walkable city that has struggled to reach its pedestrian-safety goals. For the first time, this allows for a calculation of 'crosswalk coverage' for the city as a whole. Manual review of satellite imagery documents that cross walks are present at 58% of San Francisco’s roughly 6,400intersections, though they are not evenly distributed across neighborhoods. Both hotspot analysis and comparing crosswalk coverage by Census tracts demonstrates that northern neighborhoods –even outside of the downtown core–maintain higher percentages of intersections with cross walks than those in the southern half. Intersections exhibit crosswalk ‘corridor effects,’ in that crosswalks often cluster along certain streets, including (but not limited to) commercial areas. In addition, crosswalks in four neighborhoods were analyzed to a deeper extent, including category (e.g. ladder, continental, standard), condition, and ‘completeness’ or the number of adjacent blocks with a connecting crosswalk. Across these roughly 1,000 intersections, coverage varied from 51%in the Bayview (a historic African American community) to 83%in Pacific Heights (a high-income, majority-white neighborhood). Though these patterns track somewhat with local pedestrian and automobile volumes, crosswalk coverage diverges from these data in many ways, indicating other factors at play in their distribution. Overall, satellite imagery can be used to identify marked crosswalks at scale, evaluate their quality, and probe geographic variation. Armed with such granular data, planners can consider the ways in which crosswalks are present throughout cities —and where notable gaps exist —in their pursuit of Vision Zero goals.