Transportation

Pravin Varaiya, pioneer in smart transportation, dies at 81

06/23/22 — Credited with spearheading the self-driving car revolution in the 1990s, Varaiya brought an economist's grounding to research on the internet, energy and transportation systems and urban environments

Flying buses in California skies?

04/18/22 — The CITRIS Aviation team is collaborating with Caltrans to lay the groundwork for air mobility in urban areas

A driving force behind mixed-autonomy traffic

08/26/21 — Amazon Science: Alexandre Bayen's research, combining machine learning with big data, looks at how coordinated automation could improve traffic flow, boost efficiency and slash emissions

Using AI to eliminate traffic jams

03/13/21 Fortune — ITS Director Alex Bayen explains how autonomous vehicles can help traffic flow more smoothly.

Clean Air Car Race turns 50

11/05/20 — In 1970, two teams of engineering students participated in a cross-country car race to test technologies that reduced automobile emissions.

The Clean Air Car Race turns 50

08/26/20 — In 1970, Berkeley Engineering students envisioned low-emission cars of the future

Jack Moehle receives top earthquake engineering award

03/05/20 — The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute bestowed Moehle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, with the George W. Housner Medal

Autonomous vehicles: The answer to our traffic woes

08/28/19 Wired — Berkeley Engineering's Alexandre Bayen and Liao-Cho are studying the impact that autonomous vehicles can have on traffic flow. And, their findings suggest that self-driving cars can help alleviate traffic.

Nighttime traffic on U.S. Highway 101 south of San Francisco

Shifting gears

05/01/19 — The integration of self-driving vehicles requires policy decisions that consider how travel behavior will shift with the introduction of new mobility choices.

Going with the Flow

05/01/19 — Researchers have developed a machine-learning tool to manage traffic where autonomous, partially-automated and manual vehicles share the road.

Ion drive flight test points to radically different future for aviation

12/05/18 Forbes — Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have conducted a successful 8-second flight test of an aircraft with an ion drive propulsion system, a larger version of the same cutting-edge technology that Berkeley engineers are using to fly centimeter-scale microrobots.

Watch just a few self-driving cars stop traffic jams

11/19/18 Science — Anyone can start a traffic jam - just by tapping the brakes. Now, scientists at Berkeley have shown that a few self-driving cars can prevent such jams - and in some cases double the average speed of surrounding vehicles.

Turning cars into robot traffic managers

10/29/18 — Berkeley transportation researchers are addressing the emerging era of smart vehicles with a project that uses machine learning to manage traffic where autonomous, semi-autonomous and manned vehicles share the road. They presented their project, called Flow, at the Conference on Robotic Learning.

Roadway image showing bounding boxes over objects of note, like cars and traffic signals

Download the world’s largest self-driving dataset

06/07/18 Interesting Engineering — The Berkeley DeepDrive Industry Consortium has released an open-source dataset of 100,000 self-driving video sequences - largest of its kind - to the public in hopes of helping engineers develop autonomous vehicles.

Solar cruiser

06/01/18 — Berkeley's CalSol team designed a new solar-powered vehicle that can hold four passengers.

Why some cities have had enough of Waze

05/07/18 US News & World Report — Start-up-turned-tech-giant Waze solves traffic problems for some users, but creates challenges for others by overwhelming local streets. "There's nothing inherently wrong with routing apps, but the problem is overuse," says Alexandre Bayen, director of Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies.

Where are all the driverless cars?

04/04/18 Car Connection — Firms testing self-driving cars have slowed their programs, and did not beat a path to the door of the California DMV, which on April 2 was to begin issuing permits for testing on the state's roads. Berkeley transportation engineer Steve Shladover says that's because those companies are still trying to work out some challenging wrinkles.

How car sharing is evolving the transportation landscape

03/28/18 — Peer-to-peer car-sharing services have encouraged a small number of their members to ditch car ownership, according to a first-of-its-kind study of from the UC Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Research Center.

The perfect selfishness of mapping apps

03/15/18 The Atlantic — Popular mapping and routing apps may make overall traffic conditions worse in some areas, new research by Alexandre Bayen and the Institute of Transportation Studies suggests.

Why traffic apps make congestion worse

01/30/18 — Has your smartphone traffic app ever led you into a traffic jam? Professor and traffic engineer Alexandre Bayen, director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies, is working on smarter apps that will actually talk to one another to prevent clogged freeways and city streets.