Center for Transportation Research News

Dr. Kara Kockelman, Professor of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, will speak May 3rd, 2012, at UT Austin on the topic, “The Search for Sustainable Transport: Anticipating Americans’ Vehicle and Travel Choices.” The event takes places at 5:15 p.m. in Mezes Hall on the UT Austin campus in Room 1.306.

Dr. Kockelman holds PhD, MS, and BS degrees in civil engineering, a Masters of City Planning, and a minor in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. She has received an NSF CAREER Award, U.C. Berkeley’s University Medal, MIT’s Technology Review Magazine Top 100 Innovators award, CUTC’s inaugural Young Faculty Award, RSAI’s Hewings Award, and ASCE’s Harland Bartholomew Award and Huber Prize. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Andes of Ecuador, and has advised UT’s student chapters of Engineers Without Borders, Society of Women Engineers, and Women in Transportation Studies.

Dr. Kockelman’s primary research interests include energy and climate issues (vis-à-vis transport and land use decisions), the statistical modeling of urban systems (including models of travel behavior, trade, and location choice), forecasting transport policy impacts and crash consequences. She is an author of over 100 published papers – the majority of these with her terrific UT students. Recent and current projects include NSF grants for spatial econometric models of discrete response and studies of plug-in-electric-vehicle ownership and use, an NSF RCN on sustainable cities, an EPA STAR grant for land use, transport, and air quality models, NCHRP projects on demand modeling of non-motorized travel and tolled roadways, and TxDOT projects for holistic evaluation of competing network improvement projects and the development of a transportation economics reference for practitioners.

Abstract

Transportation constitutes nearly 20 percent of household expenditures, 30 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and 70 percent of domestic petroleum consumption. In a world of volatile fuel prices, energy security issues, and climate concerns, it is imperative to understand and accurately model how vehicle ownership and usage patterns – and associated traffic conditions, land use patterns, petroleum use, and emissions – can change under different policies and contexts. This presentation offers new data on ownership decisions and traveler preferences, coupled with behavioral models for microsimulating the nation’s personal-fleet evolution under various scenarios. It examines adoption opportunities for plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) under long-run travel patterns, PEV cost effectiveness, and the performance of integrated land use-transport models in urban-system simulations. Modeled scenarios reflect different gas prices, PEV pricing, feebate policies, urban-growth boundaries, and network pricing.

In the long term, widespread adoption and use of alternative-fuel vehicles will depend on thoughtful marketing, competitive pricing, government incentives, reliable driving-range reports, energy pricing shifts, and – in the case of PEVs – adequate charging infrastructure. This presentation highlights many of the directions U.S. households, and their GHG emissions, may head, while describing methods for simulating the broader urban system.

For more information about the Energy Institute and the speaking events associated with it, visit http://www.energy.utexas.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=35&Itemid=147

The April 2012 issue of the Research Digest is now available for download; it highlights recent research publications from the Texas Department of Transportation Research Program, which is sponsored through the Research and Technology Implementation Office (RTI).

You can also stay up to date on new published research results and products from transportation research programs by subscribing to one of the CTR Library’s RSS feeds or e-mail services at http://library.ctr.utexas.edu/dbtw-wpd/textbase/browsenew.htm.

THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2012

A new report released today by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund and the Frontier Group demonstrates that Americans have been driving less since the middle of last decade. The report, Transportation and the New Generation: Why Young People are Driving Less and What it Means for Transportation Policy, shows that young people in particular are decreasing the amount they drive and increasing their use of transportation alternatives.

Transportation and the New Generation reveals that for the first time since World War II, Americans are driving less. The report shows that by 2011, the average American was driving 6 percent fewer miles per year than in 2004.

This trend away from driving is even more pronounced among young people. The average young person (age 16-34) drove 23 percent fewer miles in 2009 than the average young person in 2001. The report also notes that a growing number of young Americans do not have driver’s licenses; from 2000 to 2010, the share of 14 to 34-year-olds without a license increased from 21 percent to 26 percent.

The full report can be accessed here: http://www.uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/r…

UT-Austin/CTR attendees at the Women’s Transportation Seminar Heart of Texas Chapter’s 2012 Annual Fundraising Gala. Back row from left: Katherine Kortum, Ashley Williams, Jorge Prozzi, Jolanda Prozzi, Bridget Bienkowski, Talia McCray, Jen Duthie. Front row from left: Yiyi Wang, Sarah Janak, Lisa Loftus-Otway, Meredith Cebelak. UT student researchers Yiyi Wang and Katherine Kortum won the Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship and the WTS Leadership Legacy Scholarship.

The Heart of Texas Chapter of the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) has awarded a local project, “Using Smartphones to Collect Bicycle Travel Data in Texas,” with the 2011 Innovative Transportation Solutions Award. Researchers on the project included Joan Hudson and Yatin Rathod of the Texas Transportation Institute, and Jen Duthie and Katie Larsen of the Center for Transportation Research.

The award was given at the annual fundraising gala on March 30, 2012 in Austin, Texas. The project will also be honored with the WTS International’s 2011 Innovative Transportation Solutions Award at the Annual Conference in Denver in May 2012.

GPS-enabled smartphones allow planners access to key details of travel behavior.
To test how smartphones can be used to aid bicycle planning, the researchers asked Austin bicycliststo help them gather information about bike usage through the use of a smart phone app, CycleTracks. CycleTracks was developed by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority.

It is hoped that, if planners can improve facilities and resources, the mode share of bicyclists will increase and lead to a reduction in congestion.

Austin area bicyclists were chosen as the test group due to Austin’s strong cycling culture, its known bicycle-friendliness, and the presence of several universities including The University of Texas.

If smartphones are found to be an effective tool for collecting bicycle travel data, the information could be gathered in many locations to aid decision making as to where to locate bicycle facilities and what types of facilities users prefer.

For more information, visit the CycleTracks Austin website: http://cycletracksaustin.com/

For more information on WTS, visit the Women’s Transportation Seminar website: https://www.wtsinternational.org/

The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) has posted a video on Youtube summarizing results of the TxDOT project 5-9046-01. The video is titled “Benefits of Diamond Grinding of CRC Pavements.” The project studied the long-term benefits of grooving pavement utilizing diamond grinding.

View the YouTube Clip