Project Summary
As per SB 375, the “Transit priority projects” are projects that meet the following criteria: 1. Contain at least 50% residential use, 2. Have a minimum net density of 20 units per acre, 3. Have a floor-area ratio for the commercial portion of the project at 0.75, 4. Be located within ½ mile of either a rail stop, a ferry terminal, or a bus line with 15-minute headways. There are very few existing schemes that would allow these strict criteria for future transit and development projects. It behooves transit agencies, developers and researchers alike to propose projects that involve land developments that offer new (mass) transit paradigms within a sustainability framework. The public-private partnership transit scheme, High Coverage Point-to-Point Transit (HCPPT) developed at UCI, is such an option.
HCPPT uses real-time control technology to route private, taxi and paratransit vehicles as part of a transit system that is competitive with personal autos to transport passengers from any point to any other point within large-enough areas without incurring more than one transfer’s delay. The scheme has been developed with attractive characteristics such as scalability, “passenger-pooling” options (incentives to use the same location for a group to alight the vehicles but multiple destinations for individuals, which offers significantly better potential than carpooling). It can be implemented incrementally as feeder taxi or shared-ride vehicles to bus and rail transit systems. The research started with a PATH project in 1998 and subsequently has led to two dissertations at UCI supported by the UCTC. The initial designs and real-time routing control schemes were developed in 2002 (PhD, Cristian Cortes). The large network system design and global optimization schemes were developed later (PhD, Laia Pages, 2006). The scheme has been studied in simulation to replace the entire transit feeder system to subways in the City of Barcelona and showed significant benefits.
The proposed research here would synthesize the schemes for control modeling and analysis of the system that is already completed, with existing research on shared-use vehicles. Earlier research at UCI on shared-use vehicles at UC Davis and UC Berkeley (Sperling/Shaheen, Cervero) and in the UCI ZEVNet (Zero Emission Vehicles Network) program can also be leveraged. While the analysis and fundamental properties of shared-ride systems like HCPPT are quite different, the technologies and policy issues studies in connection with shared-use vehicles, as well as the possibilities of partnership with taxi and paratransit agencies/companies to incrementally implement it, are quite relevant in this research.
