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Sponsor: SB1

Adoption of Mobility Care Plans Among African American Older Adults in Orange County

Status

Complete

Project Timeline

June 22, 2025 - August 31, 2025

Principal Investigator

Elisa Borowski

Project Team

Natalia Nagata

Sponsor, Program

SB1 // TRIP

Areas of Expertise

Public Transit, Shared Mobility, & Active Transportation Safety, Public Health, & Mobility Justice

Team Departmental Affiliation

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Related Publications

presentation | Oct 2025

Adoption of Mobility Care Plans Among African American Older Adults in Orange County

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Autonomicity: Integrated Modeling for Field Tests of Shared-Autonomous Mobility Systems

Status

In Progress

Project Timeline

January 1, 2020 - December 31, 2020

Principal Investigator

R. (Jay) Jayakrishnan

Project Team

Eduardo Marino Fernandez, Negin Shariat, Pengyuan Sun

Sponsor, Program & Award Number

SB1 // STRP Faculty Research: 2020-56
(Also see the UC ITS page)

Areas of Expertise

Intelligent Transportation Systems, Emerging Technologies, & Big Data

Team Departmental Affiliation

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Project Summary

New mobility alternatives that are available now to various extents or are envisaged in the near future include shared mobility systems such as ridesharing and carsharing, and autonomous vehicles. A wide range of possibilities exist, in terms of the kind of vehicle supply from various mobility providers, the kind of system that underlies the network and develops the travel demand from a population of travelers, the kind of vehicle ownership or subscription options available to the residents, the associated costing and pricing paradigms and the traditional travel options such as self-driving and transit system usage. The interactions between the components of such a system are complex, and not well-understood currently. Thus an agent-based simulation platform (“Autonomicity”) has been under development at UCI with SB-1 funds. This platform has the necessary modules with proper state-of-the art routing, ride-matching, pricing and other algorithmic components, as well as the real-time communication among them. While the platform itself is not specific to a given urban network, any modeling of integrated future mobility options would require studies in a specific network. A network in the city of Irvine, California, is currently proposed to be simulated on the platform. This network is expected to be the site for one or more field tests of sensor systems as well as autonomous vehicle systems in the near future. This proposal is to prepare the integrated agent-based modeling platform for the selected network, and to use it for planning the field trials. The main item of focus is the design of test vehicle deployments using simulated results from the platform.

The Influence of Housing Characteristics on Complex Travel Behavior

Status

Complete

Project Timeline

January 1, 2020 - December 31, 2020

Principal Investigator

Michael McNally

Project Team

Rezwana Rafiq

Sponsor, Program & Award Number

SB1 // STRP Faculty Research: 2020-57
(Also see the UC ITS page)

Areas of Expertise

Travel Behavior, Land Use, & the Built Environment

Team Departmental Affiliation

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Project Summary

UPDATED ABSTRACT: Recent California policy discussions suggest that the travel impacts resulting from strategies for housing growth are not well understood, in part because metropolitan growth has always occurred according to local zoning and land use plans. Fundamental alterations of local planning guidelines, in turn, have unknown transportation impacts. This project reviewed and synthesized policy and academic literature on housing-and-transportation linkages. The project team then applied a process developed in related research to categorize tour-based travel patterns and related these to household characteristics. The project team established connections between household tour behavior and residential variables, which were used to classify types of travelers. The focus of this research was on users of public transit and ride hailing services.

Related Publications

published journal article | Oct 2021

Heterogeneity in Activity-travel Patterns of Public Transit Users: An Application of Latent Class Analysis
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice

Read more
published journal article | Apr 2023

An exploratory analysis of alternative travel behaviors of ride-hailing users
Transportation

Read more

Resiliency Impacts of Plug-in Electric Vehicles in a Smart Grid

Status

Complete

Project Timeline

January 1, 2020 - December 31, 2020

Principal Investigator

Scott Samuelsen

Project Team

Ghazal Razeghi

Sponsor, Program & Award Number

SB1 // STRP Faculty Research: 2020-64
(Also see the UC ITS page)

Areas of Expertise

Infrastructure Delivery, Operations, & Resilience Zero-Emission Vehicles & Low-Carbon Fuels

Team Departmental Affiliation

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Project Summary

While plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs)may tax the electrical grid under normal operations, PEVs can provide benefits during grid outages since they are essentially mobile energy storage resources. This concept. referred to as Mobility Services+, uses PEVs as a resiliency resource during grid outages to increase the reliability and resiliency of the grid by (1) serving critical loads through vehicle-to-home (V2H) or vehicle-to-grid (V2G) electricity transmission by discharging the batteries on the PEVs, and (2) assisting in restoring the grid after an outage by providing the necessary power and energy to restart a utility asset such as a transformer. During normal operations, however, the high electricity demand of PEVs can negatively impact the distribution network by stressing system components such as transformers. This can result in accelerated aging, increased chance of failure, and ultimately reduced reliability and resiliency of the electric grid.This project assesses the impact of PEVs on the resiliency of the electricity distribution system by: (1) assessing the use of PEVs as a resiliency resource during grid outages (Mobility Services+), (2) assessing and simulating the impact of PEVs on the distribution infrastructure during normal operations, and (3) determining the local environmental impact of clustering PEVs. A previously developed model of a smart grid consisting of two distribution circuits and a distribution substation was modified to enable the use of PEVs in vehicle-to-home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) configurations. Scenarios were simulated in which PEVs were used to serve critical loads in a home or community shelters, and a model was developed to assess the feasibility of using PEVs in grid restoration, which determined the inrush current of the substation transformer to determine the required power and energy for startup. The use of clustered PEVs and scattered PEVs in grid restoration was also considered. During normal operations, the stress on system components from high PEV demand resulted in accelerated aging and possible failure, thereby negatively impacting distribution infrastructure during normal grid operations. Smart charging is required to retain an acceptable level of resiliency. In contrast, during grid outages, this study demonstrated that PEVs can be used as an environmentally friendly resiliency resource to both serve critical loads and facilitate grid restoration with the qualification that implementation requires system upgrades including smart switches, upgraded inverters, energy management systems, and communication links.

Related Publications

published journal article | Feb 2024

Mitigating impacts associated with a high-penetration of plug-in electric vehicles on local residential smart grid infrastructure
Journal of Power Sources

Read more
policy brief | Feb 2021

Can Plug-in Electric Vehicles in a Smart Grid Improve Resiliency?

Read more
research report | Feb 2021

Resiliency Impacts of Plug-in Electric Vehicles in a Smart Grid

Read more

Transportation System Performance: Congestion Pricing, Induced Demand, and Equity

Status

Complete

Project Timeline

July 1, 2018 - June 30, 2019

Principal Investigator

Michael McNally

Project Team

Rezwana Rafiq, Chenying Qin

Sponsor, Program & Award Number

SB1 // STRP Faculty Research: 2019-31
(Also see the UC ITS page)

Areas of Expertise

Infrastructure Delivery, Operations, & Resilience Safety, Public Health, & Mobility Justice Transportation Economics, Funding, & Finance

Team Departmental Affiliation

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Project Summary

When a section of a transportation network is changed, typically in response to either current and/or forecast traffic congestion, it is relatively easy to estimate and (after project completion) to empirically measure the volume of traffic on all the sections of the network. A body of empirical evidence suggests that the majority of new capacity is in short time consumed. This leads to the common expression that states “you can’t build your way out of congestion” but such a quick conclusion belies the fact that more travel is being accommodated after capacity expansion, regardless of the resulting level of congestion. So what is this seemingly generated traffic and from where did it come? Many claim the generated traffic is induced demand, but a more nuanced characterization of the relationship between travel demand and transportation capacity is necessary to fully understand the dynamics of transportation system performance. This study will examine the objectives, assumptions, and system-wide impacts of congestion management strategies that reflect induced demand and pricing, as well as the underlying issues of social equity. Identified themes associated with the research include the measurement of economic, social, and environmental impacts of traffic congestion; the evaluation of potential strategies for improving congestion management; and the evaluation of the effects of congestion pricing on transportation and social equity. An exploratory approach will be taken and case studies will be identified in California where capacity enhancement has been completed and before/after data exists for corridor and regional performance and demographics. In addition to traffic performance, an assessment of travel behavior will utilize statewide travel surveys to identify the degree of stability in trip rates and travel time budgets as constraints on induced demand.

A New Approach to Calculating Dynamic Pricing of High-Occupancy-Toll (HOT) Lanes

Status

Complete

Project Timeline

July 1, 2018 - June 30, 2019

Principal Investigator

Wenlong Jin

Project Team

Xuting Wang, Ximeng Fan, Irene Martinez

Sponsor, Program & Award Number

SB1 // STRP Faculty Research: 2019-29
(Also see the UC ITS page)

Areas of Expertise

Transportation Economics, Funding, & Finance

Team Departmental Affiliation

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Project Summary

In the U.S., high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes are widely used on freeways to reduce congestion since the 1970s. Such lanes are reserved for cars with a minimum of two or three occupants and other qualified vehicles. Under some conditions, however, the HOV lanes are underutilized when the whole freeway system is congested. High-occupancy-toll (HOT) lanes have been one of the most successful lane management methods, which combine HOV lanes and congestion pricing strategies by charging single occupancy vehicles (SOVs) to use HOV lanes during peak periods. HOT lanes offer numerous benefits to both the operators and users by making use of the excess capacity on HOV lanes and have been implemented on State Route 91, US Route 101, and I-15 in California and other places. Generally, the operational goals for the HOT lanes are two-fold: (i) maintaining the freeflow condition; and (ii) maximizing the usage of the HOV lanes. This will help to guarantee the trip time reliability of both HOVs and paid SOVs as well as to minimize the congestion level on the general purpose (GP) lanes. The success of achieving these goals is predicated on the determination of prices dynamically, which in turn depends on an understanding of the values of time (VOTs) of SOVs. Thus, two outstanding problems are to determine a dynamic price for time-dependent demands of both HOVs and SOVs and to estimate SOVs’ VOT. This project aims to develop more effective ways to set HOT lane prices in real-time, ensuring they are used efficiently and provide reliable travel times for all drivers. The research makes three fundamental contributions: (i) presents a simpler formulation of the point queue model based on the new concept of residual capacity, (ii) proposes a simple feedback control theoretic approach to estimate the average value of time and calculate the dynamic price, and (iii) analytically and numerically proves that the closed-loop system is stable and guaranteed to converge to the optimal state, in either Gaussian or exponential manners.

Related Publications

published journal article | Nov 2021

A Control Theoretic Approach to Simultaneously Estimate Average Value of Time and Determine Dynamic Price for High-Occupancy Toll Lanes
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems

Read more
published journal article | Oct 2020

Stable dynamic pricing scheme independent of lane-choice models for high-occupancy-toll lanes
Transportation Research Part B: Methodological

Read more
policy brief | Aug 2024

A New Approach to Calculating Dynamic Pricing of High-Occupancy-Toll (HOT) Lanes Can Improve the Performance of Travel Corridors

Read more

Assessment of the Employment Accessibility Benefits of Shared Autonomous Mobility Services

Status

Complete

Project Timeline

July 1, 2018 - June 30, 2019

Principal Investigator

Michael HylandMichael Hyland

Project Team

Tanjeeb Ahmed, Navjyoth Sarma, Suman Mitra

Sponsor, Program & Award Number

SB1 // STRP Faculty Research: 2019-32
(Also see the UC ITS page)

Areas of Expertise

Public Transit, Shared Mobility, & Active Transportation

Team Departmental Affiliation

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Project Summary

Connecting people to employment opportunities is one of the most important goals of a regional transportation system. However, many people, particularly low-income families, struggle to access their current jobs and other potential employment opportunities. Shared autonomous mobility services (SAMSs), which are similar to taxi and ridesourcing services except the vehicles are driverless and centrally-operated, have the potential to overcome many of the employment accessibility challenges facing commuters. This study quantifies the potential impact of SAMS modes on access to employment opportunities in the Southern California region. The results indicate: (i) the accessibility benefit differences across latent classes are modest but young workers and low-income workers do see higher benefits than high- and middle-income workers; (ii) there are substantial spatial differences in accessibility benefits with workers living in lower density areas benefiting more than workers living in high-density areas; (iii) nearly all the accessibility benefits come from the SAMS-only mode as opposed to the SAMS+Transit mode (i.e., SAMS used in coordination with transit to complete a trip); and (iv) the SAMS cost per mile assumption significantly impacts the magnitude of the overall employment accessibility benefits.

Related Publications

published journal article | Nov 2020

Quantifying the employment accessibility benefits of shared automated vehicle mobility services: Consumer welfare approach using logsums
Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice

Read more
policy brief | May 2020

Shared Autonomous Mobility Services Show Promise for Increasing Access to Employment in Southern California

Read more
research report | Feb 2020

Assessment of the Employment Accessibility Benefits of Shared Autonomous Mobility Services

Read more

Agent-based Modeling of the Impacts of Shared/Connected Mobility on Transit Systems and Potential Synergetic Options

Status

In Progress

Project Timeline

January 1, 2019 - December 31, 2019

Principal Investigator

R. (Jay) Jayakrishnan

Project Team

Sunghi (Sunny) An, Dingtong Yang, Daisik (Danny) Nam, Eduardo Marino Fernandez

Sponsor, Program & Award Number

SB1 // STRP Faculty Research: 2019-34
(Also see the UC ITS page)

Areas of Expertise

Intelligent Transportation Systems, Emerging Technologies, & Big Data Public Transit, Shared Mobility, & Active Transportation

Team Departmental Affiliation

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Project Summary

Cities of the future demand a paradigm shift with the emerging and rapidly changing landscape of autonomous vehicles, shared mobility, connected vehicle technologies, and systems integration. System modeling is a necessary tool to study various policy alternatives due to the increasing complexity of future travel options. Unlike traditional top-down approaches for transportation planning, current and future transportation systems require more detailed representation of the various entities that interact with one another in ways that may or may not be collaborative, and whose collective behavior can lead to many possible outcomes both good and bad. This project will develop a comprehensive agent-based framework for system modeling (termed Autonomicity) for a collection of city contexts with the associated networks, demand-generation modules, supply-side details, business models, vehicles, goods and travelers that encompass the full spectrum of mobility in a future city. Associated research projects can use the Autonomicity framework / model to study specific topics, such as, the effects of ride-sharing systems or autonomous vehicles on the transit systems, or the system-wide effects of user-side subscription services from Transportation Network Companies (TNCs).

Evaluating Use of New Technologies and Services to Improve Transit and Paratransit Operations

Status

Complete

Project Timeline

January 1, 2019 - December 31, 2019

Principal Investigator

Amelia Regan

Project Team

Julius Aguma, Reza Asadi, Amari Lewis, Mandal Udayan

Sponsor, Program & Award Number

SB1 // STRP Faculty Research: 2019-39
(Also see the UC ITS page)

Areas of Expertise

Intelligent Transportation Systems, Emerging Technologies, & Big Data Public Transit, Shared Mobility, & Active Transportation

Team Departmental Affiliation

Computer Science

Project Summary

Transit operations for disabled users are notoriously expensive to provide. An interdisciplinary research team from transportation researchers in computer science, urban planning and engineering will examine two connected yet somewhat separate issues: 1) paratransit operations which serve disabled users, and 2) transit operations which among their many patrons, serve some mildly disabled users. The project team will examine the use of technologies – especially phone app based information systems and cyber-physical systems (CPS) technologies – to improve paratransit specifically and transit more generally in California communities. The use of Transportation Network Companies services to complement transit operations for disabled users will also be explored.

Methods for Analyzing Managed Lane Performance Accounting for HOV Degradation

Status

In Progress

Project Timeline

January 1, 2019 - December 31, 2019

Principal Investigator

R. (Jay) Jayakrishnan

Project Team

Riju Lavanya, Marjan Mosslemi, Navjyoth Sarma

Sponsor, Program & Award Number

SB1 // STRP Faculty Research: 2019-30
(Also see the UC ITS page)

Areas of Expertise

Infrastructure Delivery, Operations, & Resilience

Team Departmental Affiliation

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Project Summary

The state of California has a vast network of close to 1,750 lane miles of managed lanes. This accounts for nearly 40% of the total managed lane network in the US. A managed lane facility includes High Occupancy Vehicle lanes (HOV), High Occupancy Toll lane (HOT) and Express lanes. Congestion on HOV lanes in California has been increasing over the years, with as much as 68% of total lane miles found to meet Federal standards for HOV lane degradation. As per Federal definition, an HOV facility is degraded if vehicles operating on the facility fail to maintain a minimum average operating speed (45 mph) 90% of the time over a consecutive 180-day period during morning or evening weekday peak hour periods. Caltrans have been preparing annual degradation action plans to outline measures to mitigate degradation. Despite improvements in certain corridors, the number of degraded lane miles continue to increase. Prior research has shown limitations of ‘one-dimensional’ definition for HOV lane degradation, which as an aggregate measure provides very little information to practitioners. A more nuanced approach is helpful; one that considers a variety of factors such as comparative advantage over adjacent general purpose lanes, travel time reliability, HOV access type, geometry, incidents, and demand patterns. The main objective of this project is to develop analysis and modeling methods to help in policy decisions on managed lanes, with specific focus on HOV lanes, including the performance and degradation these lanes as well as the enforcement of lane utilization rules and their violation. The second objective is to apply these methods to evaluate the effectiveness of incentive policies allowing clean air vehicles to travel in HOV lanes. The third objective is to provide new tools, including simulation techniques, for decision-making with regard to conversion of HOV lanes to HOT lanes.

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