Transportation

Otto self-driving truck on highway test run

Uber Is betting we’ll see driverless 18-wheelers before taxis

09/08/16 MIT Technology Review — With its acquisition of self-driving truck startup Otto, Uber is hoping for a shortcut in the race to profit from driverless vehicles. But research engineer Steven Shladover of Berkeley's California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology Program (PATH) sees challenges - real and perceived - in putting 40-ton trucks on the road with only software behind the wheel.

Student Katherine Rose Driggs Campbell in a driving simulator

$4.6 million grant to improve how automated cars, drones interact with humans

09/08/16 — As companies contemplate deploying self-driving cars, trucks and delivery drones, Berkeley engineers are embarking on a major project to improve how they interact with humans.

Anthony Levandowski (right) and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in the lobby of Uber’s headquarters

How robot lover Anthony Levandowski pioneered the driverless car

08/22/16 The Guardian — Anthony Levandowski (B.S.'02, M.S.'03 IEOR) is one the most influential engineers behind self-driving vehicles. Now that Uber has bought his latest startup, Otto, he talks about how it all started with a phone call from Mom.

Whooshing into the future

06/21/16 California magazine — Aiming to make speed-of-sound commutes a reality, the bLoop team, made up of 40 UC Berkeley students and faculty, is heading into the final round of the hyperloop competition sponsored by Elon Musk's SpaceX company.

On the road to driverless cars

05/24/16 Berkeley Science Review — How Berkeley research, including foundational work by PATH plus recent advances in engineering and computer science, is fundamental to industry progress on automated transportation.

Susan Shaheen speaking at the Smart City Challenge kickoff

San Francisco, UC Berkeley team up to tackle transit challenges

05/05/16 — UC Berkeley transportation researchers joined San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee in inviting the region's tech companies to join the Smart City Challenge, a Department of Transportation competition that could bring $40 million to the city and UC Berkeley to create the nation's first smart transportation network.

Diagram of Berkeley Hyperloop prototype, showing air bearings, safety features, signals and controls.

Learning to levitate

05/01/16 — This August, the Berkeley Hyperloop (bLoop) team will shoot its transportation pod down a test track at high speeds for a design competition. But first, the team of 40 students must make their Hyperloop pod levitate.

Rising seas: A new look at resilient infrastructure

05/01/16 — A cross-disciplinary team of researchers is studying how sea-level rise will impact and disrupt the Bay Area using a variety of data modeling and analysis methods.

How the daily commute is going to change

04/25/16 Wall Street Journal — Susan Shaheen, a researcher at the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley, says ride-sharing carpool services being developed by Uber and Lyft could help fix some of the "first-mile, last-mile" issues with U.S. transportation grids, providing shorter trips to and from public transportation systems.

Automakers go back to school for self-driving cars

03/16/16 Bloomberg Business — Automakers Ford, Toyota and Volkswagen, along with electronic companies Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm and Panasonic, are collaborating to fund artificial intelligence research at UC Berkeley, hoping this DeepDrive alliance can help them build the brains behind self-driving cars.

The road to sustainability

01/28/16 CNBC — In a new video series on sustainable energy, civil and environmental engineering professor Arpad Horvath compares the environmental footprints of emerging transportation technologies, from biofuels and high-speed rail to maritime shipping and aviation.

Still no flying cars? The future of transit promises something even better

11/06/15 The Guardian — EECS professor Alexandre Bayen, director of the Institute for Transportation Studies, joins other transportation experts in discussing navigation and booking apps, driverless cars and automated buses, and other ways that technology promises to revolutionize the transportation industry.

Transit trends

11/01/15 — While not known for fast responses to the market, automakers are now making modifications to suit the sharing economy, which is growing by 35 percent a year. If only they could do something about poor driving practices, most notably, the jerk merge.

Ride-sharing forces automakers to rethink how they sell cars

06/30/15 Los Angeles Times — Every vehicle that goes into a full-time car-sharing service, such as short-time rental company Zipcar, supplants four to six new car sales and postpones the purchase of up to seven more, says Susan Shaheen, a transportation sustainability researcher and adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Why do buses always come in bunches?

06/17/15 CityMetric — Lewis Lehe, a transport engineering Ph.D. candidate, has built a game of sorts to demonstrate the math behind the unfortunate truth that city buses serving the same route tend to arrive in clumps, one right behind the other.

Smart scooter

05/01/15 — Modified Razor scooters are used in a cyber-physical system design course to how electric vehicles interface with the energy grid.

UC grad students deliver solutions, startups

04/24/15 University of California — Grad students from across the UC system will descend on Sacramento April 28 for Graduate Research Advocacy Day. Among them will be Berkeley civil engineering grad student André Carrel, who is studying how bus service reliability affects ridership.