Transportation

Heavy truck entering the Caldecott Tunnel

Air pollution down thanks to California’s regulation of diesel trucks

12/12/14 Berkeley Lab — Detailed measurement of emissions from thousands of heavy trucks in the Bay Area by Berkeley Lab air quality scientists, led by adjunct professor Thomas Kirchstetter and professor Rob Harley, both of civil and environmental engineering, showed a dramatic reduction in pollutants in the wake of aggressive new regulations implemented by the California Air Resources Board.

Self-driven to solve transportation problems

11/21/14 San Jose Mercury News — Mechanical engineering professor Karl Hedrick, director of Berkeley's Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory, has spent decades researching the nonlinear control systems that set the foundation for today's smart cars.

The unknown start-up that built Google’s first self-driving car

11/20/14 IEEE Spectrum — The story behind Google's innovative self-driving car and the revolutionary Street View camera technology that preceded begins with 510 Systems, a tiny Berkeley start-up launched by IEOR grad (and later Google engineer) Anthony Levandowski and fellow Berkeley Engineering student Bryon Majusiak.

Supercharging more electric cars risks crashing the grid

11/05/14 California magazine — U.S. electrical grids might not be ready for the new wave of electric vehicles expected within the decade. But the Smart Cities Research Center in civil and environmental engineering is working on data-driven ways to prevent a grid meltdown.

Bullet train just a blur in California governor’s race

10/28/14 Los Angeles Times — Civil engineering professor Robert Bea, a pioneering expert in the field of risk analysis, comments on the relatively small role California's bullet train is playing in the state's gubernatorial election, and how that could become a problem down the line.

PEER issues preliminary report on Napa quake

09/22/14 Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center — PEER has published a preliminary report on the Aug. 24 South Napa earthquake, drawing on the extensive observations of faculty, staff and students who were deployed to the region in the days following the magnitude 6.0 quake.

What could collapse the Golden Gate Bridge?

09/19/14 KALW — At the movies, the Golden Gate Bridge has been leveled by earthquakes, apes, even a mega-shark. But how would the iconic span fare in more realistic disaster scenarios? Civil engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl helps KALW radio figure it out.

ITS grad students receive Eisenhower fellowships

08/29/14 — Three Institute of Transportation Studies graduate students, Frank Proulx, Jesus Barajas and Lisa Rayle, have won coveted 2014 Dwight David Eisenhower Graduate Fellowships for their research in transportation planning.

Last-minute mergers endanger drivers, worsen traffic jams

08/28/14 San Francisco Chronicle — The "jerk merge," where drivers cut into a traffic lane at the last possible moment, is "probably the most disruptive to traffic" and should be a target of police action, says Michael Cassidy, professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Scholars on scooters

08/14/14 — Students zip around campus on electric scooters while learning about energy, transportation and vehicle-to-grid systems in a new civil engineering class.

Delays persist for U.S. high-speed rail

08/06/14 New York Times — Despite enormous U.S. investments in high-speed rail projects since 2009, little progress has been made. Civil engineering professor C. William Ibbs explains why that might be.

More woes for high-speed rail

03/31/14 San Francisco Business Times — The $68 billion cost estimate for a Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail network is far too low, and the system may be eclipsed by emerging technologies before the 30-year project is completed, civil engineering professor C. William Ibbs warned the state Senate transportation committee last week.

What does an ‘energy transition’ look like?

02/27/14 National Geographic — On National Geographic's Great Energy Challenge blog, Daniel Kammen, professor of energy and society at Berkeley Engineering, talks about first-hand experience with the kind of dramatic transition to a clean-energy economy that he studies as director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory.

Tesla Team at the New York City finish line

Electric cars go cross-country

02/10/14 Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative — Santiago Miret, a Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering, writes about range anxiety by electric vehicle owners, and how it has prompted a pair of recent coast-to-coast road trips by drivers of the Tesla Model S.

Mind the gap

05/01/13 — ITS graduate student Dan Howard re-envisioned the Berkeley campus in the style of the iconic London Underground map.

Connected Corridors aims to boost efficiency of existing roads

03/18/13 Berkeley Research — Connected Corridors, a project led by engineering professors Alex Bayen and Roberto Horowitz, is developing technologies to help Caltrans gather and analyze traffic data. A goal of the research: to make existing roadways more efficient, rather than launching new highway-construction projects.

Berkeley’s exoskeletons a ‘Miracle of Nature’

12/03/12 BBC One — The new BBC show "Miracles of Nature," hosted by Richard Hammond, filmed a recent episode at Berkeley's Etcheverry Hall, where the crew explored the medical exoskeleton system being developed by mechanical engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni and his graduate students.

Bullet-train planners face huge engineering challenge

11/12/12 Los Angeles Times — An audacious plan is taking shape on the drawing boards of California's bullet train planners as they envision a high-speed rail line from Bakersfield to L.A. that will travel over two mountain ranges and more than half a dozen earthquake faults. The crossing is seizing the imagination of engineers who see it as the greatest design challenge of the $68-billion project. "It is the project of the century," said Berkeley civil engineering professor Bill Ibbs.

Chart showing info collected by Quantified Traveler app

Rerouting behavior

11/01/12 — Associate professors of civil and environmental engineering Raja Sengupta and Joan Walker created the Quantified Traveler app to quantify what influences travel behavior and to encourage more sustainable travel.

Building green motorcycles

11/01/12 — Most of the things motorcycle makers call character, like throaty pipes, are really just covering up byproducts of internal combustion—and masking energy lost during power production. In contrast, electric motorcycles are stealthy and quiet, a trait not lost on riders. Abe Askenazi, head of engineering at Zero Motorcycles. (Photo courtesy Zero Motorcycles)“If you get on […]