Urban Transportation - A Special Challenge for Civil Engineers

Transportation has historically had a major influence on cities - their locations, growth and form. Civil engineers were the leading public servants in construction of railway and transit systems. With diversification of transportation and, particularly, growth of highways, the solutions to urban transportation have become extremely complex. Instead of only building new facilities, it is now necessary to coordinate different modes. Planning of transportation is defined at four levels: individual facilities, single mode networks, intermodal systems and city-transportation relationships. It is shown that the latter two levels have not been adequately performed. Coordination of systems must be given greater attention. A brief review of successes and failures in urban transportation in different countries, with particular emphasis on Japan, is given at the end. The transportation and civil engineers\u27 roles should change to include a much greater emphasis on systems approach in planning, design, operation and policy. It is particularly important that engineers give attention to the methods for achieving efficient and attractive cities

Walking, Transit Use, and Urban Morphology in Walkable Urban Neighborhoods: An Examination of Behaviors and Attitudes in Seattle

Creating walkable and transit oriented cities is an important planning objective. Cities are actively promoting walkability and are investing billions of dollars in public transit in an effort to reduce automobile dependence. This dissertation investigates the relationship between transit use and walking in walkable urban neighborhoods – neighborhoods that are dense; have mixed land uses; connected street networks; numerous destinations; and high transit accessibility. This research examines the different purposes that walking and transit serve in different parts of the city. I focus on walkable urban neighborhoods to push walkability research beyond its current emphasis on identifying the characteristics of walkable environments compared to less walkable neighborhoods. I instead examine how walkability varies in highly walkable places that are outwardly more similar than not. I use a nested case study research design with mixed methods. Seattle and its urban core neighborhoods serve as my cases. Neighborhood mapping, pedestrian observations, a travel behavior survey, and interviews provide both quantitative and qualitative data to answer my research questions. The project emphasizes the role that different types of infrastructure play in facilitating walking and transit use: pedestrian-oriented infrastructure, transit infrastructure, and automobile infrastructure. The emphasis on infrastructure helps to bridge the gap between urban planning and urban design research and more accurately reflects the way that urban residents experience and talk about the urban environment. The urban core of Seattle is a predominantly pedestrian environment, and there is significant variation in the levels of walking between the seven neighborhoods studied. Neighborhoods with more pedestrian infrastructure and less automobile infrastructure have higher levels of walking. Similar patterns are evident at the block scale, where pedestrian infrastructure positively influences walking and more automobile infrastructure correlates to less walking. The availability of transit positively correlates with higher walking activity. Higher quality transit, such as light rail (rather than bus), encourages people to walk greater distances to use transit. Additionally, even though there is frequent and abundant transit in the urban core, a majority of people walk to destinations within the urban core because walking is often the most efficient mode of transportation available. Next to walking, driving is the second most common mode of transportation among residents in the urban core. These findings contradict mainstream planning conceptions of transportation and urban form. We would expect transit to be a heavily utilized mode of transportation in the urban core, but walking and driving are the most common. Outside the urban core, driving is most common, despite frequent transit service throughout Seattle. This is because the transit that exists primarily serves commuting to Downtown. The findings of this dissertation suggest that planners need a new approach to transportation planning that prioritizes walking and transit at different geographic scales throughout the city based on where they are the most efficient. The urban core neighborhoods need to prioritize walking. Instead, the city over-emphasizes transit and continues to accommodate the automobile in the urban core. Planners over-emphasize transit in both the urban core and in suburban and rural areas and not in the places where transit is most effective – in the area up to 12.5 miles away from the urban center. Planners can create sustainable and livable cities by rebuilding a vibrant pedestrian realm and by connecting neighborhoods with efficient and reliable transit, which meets the needs of all people.PHDUrban and Regional PlanningUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144077/1/dmcaslan_1.pd

General scores for accessibility and inequality measures in urban areas

In the last decades, the acceleration of urban growth has led to an unprecedented level of urban interactions and interdependence. This situation calls for a significant effort among the scientific community to come up with engaging and meaningful visualizations and accessible scenario simulation engines. The present paper gives a contribution in this direction by providing general methods to evaluate accessibility in cities based on public transportation data. Through the notion of isochrones, the accessibility quantities proposed measure the performance of transport systems at connecting places and people in urban systems. Then we introduce scores rank cities according to their overall accessibility. We highlight significant inequalities in the distribution of these measures across the population, which are found to be strikingly similar across various urban environments. Our results are released through the interactive platform: www.citychrone.org, aimed at providing the community at large with a useful tool for awareness and decision-making

Urban Goods Movement and Local Climate Action Plans: Assessing Strategies to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Urban Freight Transportation

This report examines how freight transport/goods movement has been addressed in U.S. city climate action planning. Transportation generally is a major contributor of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and freight transport represents a growing component of transportation’s share. Almost all climate action plans (CAPs) address transportation generally, but we wished to focus on efforts to reduce GHG emissions from freight transport specifically. We analyzed 27 advanced local CAPs to determine the degree to which freight transport was targeted in goals and strategies to reduce GHG emissions. We found only six CAPs that included direct measures or programs to reduce freight emissions. Many of the CAPs mentioned general transportation objectives such as lowering vehicle miles traveled or reducing emissions from city-owned vehicle fleets, but most did not include strategies or actions that explicitly targeted freight transport. We identified the specific strategies and actions that cities are taking to address GHG emissions from freight transport, such as working with the freight community to promote anti-idling and encourage transitions to electric and alternative fuel delivery vehicles. We also analyzed freight transport plans relevant for the same cities, and found that most do not explicitly mention reducing GHG emissions. Most of the freight plans are focused on improving reliability and efficiency of freight movement, which would likely have the ancillary benefit of reducing GHG emissions, but that goal was not explicitly targeted in most of these plans. Based on our findings, we recommend that cities specifically target freight transport goals and strategies in their CAPs and better coordinate with planners developing freight transport plans to identify GHG emission reduction approaches

Routing Strategies for Emergency Management Decision Support Systems During Evacuation

Simulation studies of urban transportation networks have been increasingly applied to evacuation planning. The level of detail provided within a traffic simulation model allows for devising strategies for evacuation and emergency response. In this research, simulation model of downtown San Jose, California, transportation network is developed to evaluate the efficiency of the evacuation process under hypothetical scenarios. Although the scenarios evaluated herein are not exhaustive, they demonstrate the potential of the simulation approach for managing traffic engineering aspects of the emergency response. The scenarios described here include the use of contraflow lanes, traffic incidents on the network, and a modal shift to transit by evacuees. It was found that among the tested scenarios, reduction in number of vehicles on the road through increased public transit ridership in conjunction with rerouting vehicles and contraflow operations on key corridors would be the most efficient approach. The major contribution of this study is the ability to examine not only the travel times for evacuees but also mobility and accessibility for emergency vehicles. The time to access location(s) under distress, while ensuring efficient evacuation operations at the same time, is critical to reducing losses during an unfolding human-caused disaster

Promoting Intermodal Connectivity at California’s High Speed Rail Stations

High-speed rail (HSR) has emerged as one of the most revolutionary and transformative transportation technologies, having a profound impact on urban-regional accessibility and inter-city travel across Europe, Japan, and more recently China and other Asian countries. One of HSR’s biggest advantages over air travel is that it offers passengers a one-seat ride into the center of major cities, eliminating time-consuming airport transfers and wait times, and providing ample opportunities for intermodal transfers at these locales. Thus, HSR passengers are typically able to arrive at stations that are only a short walk away from central business districts and major tourist attractions, without experiencing any of the stress that car drivers often experience in negotiating such highly congested environments. Such an approach requires a high level of coordination and planning of the infrastructural and spatial aspects of the HSR service, and a high degree of intermodal connectivity. But what key elements can help the US high-speed rail system blend successfully with other existing rail and transit services? That question is critically important now that high-speed rail is under construction in California. The study seeks to understand the requirements for high levels of connectivity and spatial and operational integration of HSR stations and offer recommendations for seamless, and convenient integrated service in California intercity rail/HSR stations. The study draws data from a review of the literature on the connectivity, intermodality, and spatial and operational integration of transit systems; a survey of 26 high-speed rail experts from six different European countries; and an in-depth look of the German and Spanish HSR systems and some of their stations, which are deemed as exemplary models of station connectivity. The study offers recommendations on how to enhance both the spatial and the operational connectivity of high-speed rail systems giving emphasis on four spatial zones: the station, the station neighborhood, the municipality at large, and the region