We apply a fixed-effects model to examine the impact of trade and environmental policies on air quality at ports along the U.S. Mexico border. We control for other factors influencing air quality, such as air quality of cities near the border, volume of traffic flows and congestion. Results show the air quality improved after 2004, when the diesel engine policy was applied. We see mixed results for the trade policy, whose implementation time varies across ports along the international border. Controlling for air quality in cities near the border is essential for assessing the policy contributions to air quality.
Linda Fernandez has been associate professor of environmental and resource economics at UC Riverside since 2005. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley’s Dept. of Agricultural and Resource Economics. Her research explores public and private economic incentives for pollution control and natural resource protection through empirical applications of economic theory. Her research can be divided into three major categories: 1) transboundary environmental problems; 2) biodiversity; 3) air and water quality regulations.
A simulation-based pilot study is performed to evaluate the socio-economic effect of seismic retrofit of bridges using Caltrans’ Los Angeles area highway network as testbed. 47 scenario earthquakes that represent the regional seismic hazard, consistent with the USGS hazard data are used for this purpose.Two sets of bridge fragility curves, for before and after seismic retrofit, are developed and used to simulate the seismic performance of the network in both cases. The analysis estimates the total societal cost arising from drivers’ delay and loss of opportunity cost in the damaged network. The benefit of seismic retrofit is computed as present values of the total future economic loss avoided both from societal cost and from repair/restoration cost over the remaining bridge service lives. Estimated benefit is compared with the retrofit cost to establish the
benefit-cost ratio. Study shows that from Caltrans’ point of view bridge seismic retrofit is cost-effective when loss avoided due to societal cost is considered.
Dr. Shinozuka is a world-renowned expert in earthquake and structural engineering. He is especially interested in field theory and risk assessment methodology in civil engineering.
Dr. Shinozuka’s research focuses on continuum mechanics, micromechanics, stochastic processes and fields, structural dynamics and control, and earthquake and wind engineering. He also studies systems engineering, with an emphasis on structural and system reliability; risk assessment of lifeline systems, including water, electrical power and transportation networks; and analysis of the socio-economic impacts of natural disasters. He also is interested in advanced technologies, specifically remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) for disaster assessment and mitigation, smart materials and structures, and nondestructive evaluation.
The applications for his work are in earthquake engineering in buildings, bridges, lifelineand environmental systems. His workhighlights the multidisciplinary aspects of infrastructure system problems.
Dr. Shinozuka is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Paratransit services often adopt decentralized zoning strategies to divide large service area into smaller zones assigned to different providers in order to simplify their management. If zones are independently managed, there is no coordination among providers. This causes the overall system to be quite inefficient, due to a large
amount of empty trip miles driven, a major cause for these services’ high operating costs. Coordination among providers is possible by including transfer points at zone boundaries and can potentially improve productivity. The zoning with transfer practice has been adopted by some transit agencies (Chicago, Boston and San Diego,
for example) but never properly investigated from a research point of view. This research study evaluates the impact of transfer design on decentralized zoning paratransit through extensive simulation analyses and related sensitivity analyses to evaluate the interaction among geographic boundaries, size of service area, demand distribution and number of transfer points.
Dr. Luca Quadrifoglio graduated with the Laurea in Chemical Engineering (1996) from the Giulio Natta Department of Chemistry, Materials & Chemical Engineering at the Politecnico of Milan (Italy). He worked as a Process Engineer and Project Economist for Snamprogetti (ENI Group) in Milan for five years, being primarily responsible for developing large-scale techno-economic feasibility studies as a decision support tool for the firm’s executives. He received his M.S. in Engineering Management (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) degrees from the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. Then he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the USC’s Department of Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) until August 2006, when he joined the Faculty of the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Dr. Quadrifoglio published a number of papers in top rated Journals, won the 2006 Pritsker Doctoral Dissertation Award (3rd place) and the 2004 Council of University Transportation Center (CUTC) National Student Award for best publication in Science and Technology.
His research interests are related to the broad field of Operations Research applied to a variety of fields, primarily Transportation/Logistics, and include Transportation Systems Modeling and Design, Network Optimization, Math Programming, Simulation, Scheduling Algorithms (Vehicle Routing, Pickup and Delivery), Innovative Transit/Logistics Solutions, Performance/Risk/Decision Analysis.
This seminar will discuss on-going work in the area of energyshed development and its associated regulatory structures and land use implications. Specifically, the talk will focus on the concept of a regional energyshed and examine the ways in which social, jurisdictional, and regulatory constraints present clear and frequently unnecessary hurdles to reducing energy use.
In this paper travel behavior dynamics are examined from a lifespan development perspective using Lifecourse approaches, Brofenbenner’s Person-Process-Context-Time (PPCT) model of development, and Bourdieu’s habitus-fields-capital approach. The combination of these three approaches to travel behavior analysis offers a unifying framework with unprecedented insight. To illustrate the theoretical constructs, the life of a virtual individual is used as a case study. Different periods of her life are reconstructed from a variety of data sources to show her situational, dispositional, and behavioral changes over time and to illustrate how patterns of behavior are reproduced within her cohort, household, and across generations. The paper also provides an overview of the data needed and a data collection schema that can help us unravel the complexity of each person’s observed behavior in its interactive relationship with other persons and their environments as they develop along their lifespan
This research explores the complex relationship between traffic
congestion and accessibility. Congestion describes both operating
conditions on transportation networks, and individual access to
opportunities. The effects of congestion variations remain relatively
understudied. Accordingly, this research proposes a conceptual
framework with three components. First, congestion can constrain
mobility and thus indirectly reduce accessibility. Second, congestion
is associated with agglomerations of activity and therefore with
increased accessibility. Finally, congestion is in part a phenomenon of
perception and behavior. Congestion and individual travel data for the
Los Angeles region are used to explore the localized spatial
relationship between congestion and accessibility. As the multifaceted
framework suggests, congestion varies substantially by neighborhood.
Some neighborhoods examined in this analysis appear to be more
“congestion adapted” than others. While individual tripmaking is to a
large degree a function of individual and household characteristics, we
construct a model to account for such characteristics. We conclude that
conventional network-based measures of congestion delays paint an
incomplete and perhaps misleading picture of the effects of traffic
congestion and call for a fresh look at both the down- and upsides of
traffic congestion.
In the United States, and increasingly the world, the automobile is
indispensable to economic and personal mobility needs. Unfortunately,
utilization of personal vehicles is currently entirely dependent on the
combustion of petroleum energy sources. Consequently, cars are a major
contributor to urban air quality problems, are the leading emitter of
greenhouse gases in car-crazy societies like California, and rely on a
diminishing supply of oil from geopolitically sensitive areas. As
global demand for mobility continues to increase, new energy sources and
new vehicle powertrains must be developed and commercialized that can
both appeal to consumers and mitigate the environmental side effects of
transportation.
This presentation examines the role that mobility plays in the progress of humankind and its importance as a cornerstone of the transportation profession. I first provide an interpretation of the elements of mobility and its evolution over time before analyzing approaches to perform mobility changes and criteria for successfully implementing new transportation modes. Finally, I present an overview of the issues and challenges created by mobility in a modern complex society.
Transportation-related air pollution and energy problems are a significant issue in the U.S. and across the world. The World Health Organization estimates that urban air pollution causes 200,000 deaths per year worldwide. Sacrificing transportation needs for environmental quality is simply infeasible since transportation provides a vital wheel for economic development. How do we meet the transportation needs in the age of development without sacrificing environment and energy sustainability? Dr. Gao’s research focuses on the nexus of transportation and environment/energy systems. In this talk Dr. Gao takes a phased approach looking into the inter-relationships of the following six intermingling topics that span across transportation, air quality, and energy systems: cleanup of the legacy diesel fleet-mathematical modeling in search for cost-effective environment abatement strategies; equity and environmental justice in the clean diesel programs; truck traffic and ozone weekend effect (OWE): emphasizing the nonlinear dynamics between transportation emissions control and ozone pollution; catching the moving targets: from PM mass to PM number; and environmental impacts of biofuels.
The transportation sector contributes approximately 30% of the total energy usage, which is mostly attributed to petroleum-based products such as gasoline and diesel fuels. Significant emissions of CO_2 , a greenhouse gas linked to climate change, are attributed to the transportation sector. However, it would be difficult to imagine our modern life without motorized transportation. The more compelling fact is that though transportation is not the largest source of greenhouse gases, this sector is the fastest growing source and is difficult to control. Alternative transportation energy sources such as hybrid-electric technologies, bio-ethanol, and hydrogen fuel cells are emerging and are being broadly investigated as replacements for the
conventional internal combustion engine. However, these new alternatives are still difficult to make competitive against oil-powered engines due to availability, cost, convenience, lack of technology, and accessibility. No simple solutions are suggested on the road toward the energy efficient and greener future. One of the key strategies in improving vehicle fuel efficiency is through enhancing vehicle fuel efficiency either by enhancing the vehicle powertrain efficiency, or by using alternative fuels, or by managing the transportation system more efficiently. This presentation describes the research that is being conducted at Virginia Tech to develop energy and emission models for use in Advanced Traffic Management System (ATMS), Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS), IntelliDrive system, and eco-drive system applications.