Reducing the Carbon Footprint of Freight Movement through Eco-Driving Programs for Heavy-Duty Trucks

DTRT13-G-UTC29Eco-driving involves fuel efficient driving techniques and maintenance practices. Truck eco-driving may provide economic or other incentives to drivers to avoid heavy traffic, drive at moderate speeds, avoid sudden braking or acceleration, reduce idling, and maintain specified tire inflation. Truck eco-driving can reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by 5-15%. Educating drivers is a crucial component of eco-driving programs. Other components include vehicle maintenance and technology support, such as speed limiters, and policy support, such as subsidies for engine retrofitting or incorporating eco-driving into the commercial driver's license process

The Mode is not the Methods: Assessing Changes in Biking, Walking and Transit in California using the 2012 CHTS and 2017 NHTS

Caltrans 65A0686 Task Order 042USDOT Grant 69A35This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Please cite this article as: Pike, Susie, and Susan Handy. 2022. \u201cThe Mode Is Not the Methods: Assessing Changes in Biking, Walking and Transit in California Using the 2012 CHTS and 2017 NHTS.\u201d Findings, August. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.37777Data from the 2012 California Household Travel Survey (CHTS) and the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) suggest that biking, walking, and transit use in California decreased over this five-year period. In light of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and State Transportation Agency (CalSTA)'s goal of tripling walking and doubling biking and transit use in their most recent strategic plan, these unanticipated results raised concerns about whether these decreases stem from methodological differences and choices about analysis between the two surveys. In this study, we evaluate numerous differences between the two surveys to assess whether the changes are likely to be real, or the result of methodological differences between the CHTS and the NHTS. We find that overall, the use of biking, walking and transit decreased over this time period, and these results are generally consistent across methodological differences and analysis choices

Implementing and Evaluating a Rural Electric Mobility Program: National Center for Sustainable Transportation

Rural residents face unique transportation challenges due to long travel distances, infrequent transit service, the high cost of car ownership, and limited access to app-based rideshare services that are common in more populated urban centers. These barriers are particularly significant for lower-income residents, who may struggle to afford a personal vehicle but have few alternatives to get to work, school, medical appointments, and other important destinations. Researchers at the National Center for Sustainable Transportation, headquartered at the University of California, Davis, worked with government and non-profit partners to plan, launch, and evaluate an innovative transportation program for rural residents: a non-profit, electric carsharing service to provide affordable, clean mobility to communities in California\u2019s San Joaquin Valley

Scale in Housing Policy: A Case Study of the Potential of Small Area Fair Market Rents

65A0527 TO 017].Public Domain article. Citation: Palm, Matthew. Scale in Housing Policy: A Case Study of the Potential of Small Area Fair Market Rents. Cityscape, vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 2018.The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) caps subsidies for Section 8 housing vouchers using limits known as the Fair Market Rents (FMRs). HUD recently implemented Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs), based on ZIP Codelevel rents, to improve options for voucher recipients in high-opportunity areas. I use a proprietary dataset of for-rent listings to test the ways in which SAFMRs would change the number of listings below FMR across five California HUD metropolitan FMR areas\u2014Oakland-Fremont, Sacramento--Roseville--Arden-Arcade, San Diego-Carlsbad, San Francisco, and San Jose-Sunnyvale, Santa Clara. I examine local housing authorities\u2019 concerns regarding the SAFMRs. I find the SAFMRs will increase the number of listings below FMR in high-opportunity neighborhoods across each area studied except San Francisco. I confirm Oakland housing authorities\u2019 concerns that the SAFMRs would reduce the number of units below FMR in areas with rapidly rising rents. I find that Sacramento and San Diego may benefit most from the SAFMRs among those studied. These findings validate HUD\u2019s criteria for identifying areas in which to implement the SAFMRs, as Sacramento and San Diego are also the only two areas among the case studies in this article that HUD initially approved for SAFMRs implementation. The SAFMRs highlight the importance of geographic scale in housing policy implementation

Bridging Model Estimates of Vehicular Emissions with Near-Roadway Ambient Measurements

This research focused on developing a module that can be added into current emission simulators, such as the EPA\u2019s MOVES, that bridges the gap between portable emissions measurement systems (PEMS) / dynamometer measurements to account for gas-particle partitioning processes occurring on a timescale representative of near roadway monitors

The California Sustainable Freight Action Plan Requires Consideration of Economic Competitiveness of the Freight Sector [Policy Brief]

This brief summarizes the research support that METRANS has been providing to this stakeholder group. The first phase of the work was to establish a framework for measuring economic competitiveness and establishing a 2030 target. METRANS has taken a deliberate approach in order to achieve consensus among the stakeholders and assure that the process would result in meaningful metrics

Sacramento Area Travel Survey: Before Bike-Share

Cities throughout the world have implemented bike-share systems as a strategy for expanding mobility options and improving the sustainability of the urban transportation system. These systems have attracted substantial ridership, even in the U.S., but the impact on overall levels of bicycling and other modes of travel have not been well documented. The purpose of this project is to document the impacts of a bike-share system to be launched by the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) in 2018. The project uses a before-and-after methodology to directly measure the impact of the bike-share system on levels of bicycling, transit use, and vehicle-miles of travel as well as attitudes towards bicycling in the area served by the system. This report summarizes the method and results for the first phase of the study, the \u201cbefore\u201d survey implemented in April 2016

Current Natural Gas Infrastructure Can Accommodate Future Conversion to Near-Zero Transportation Technology [Policy Brief]

Contract No. 14-317Project Name: Potential to Build Current Natural Gas Infrastructure to Accommodate the Future Conversion of Near-Zero Transportation TechnologyThis policy brief summarizes findings from the research project which examines how NG infrastructure can be economically and technologically synergistic for both NG and RNG in the near term, and for RNG and other renewables such as hydrogen in the long term. In particular, it examines optimum paths for developing infrastructure in the near term that will accommodate alternative fuels once they become available at the commercial scale. The original design of California\u2019s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) provides time for the development of advanced, near-zero technologies. The research considers the use of LCFS credits in its analysis

Results of the 2016-17 Campus Travel Survey

The UC Davis Campus Travel Survey is a joint effort by the Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS) and the National Center for Sustainable Transportation, part of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis. Since 2007 the survey has been administered each fall by a graduate student at the Institute of Transportation Studies. The main purpose of the survey is to collect annual data on how the UC Davis community travels to campus, including mode choice, vehicle occupancy, distances traveled, and carbon emissions. Over the past ten years, the travel survey results have been used to assess awareness and utilization of campus transportation services and estimate demand for new services designed to promote sustainable commuting at UC Davis. Data from the campus travel survey have also provided researchers with valuable insights about the effects of attitudes and perceptions of mobility options on commute mode choice. This year\u2019s survey is the tenth administration of the campus travel survey. The 2016-17 survey was administered online in October and November 2016, distributed by email to a stratified random sample of 24,029 students, faculty, and staff (out of an estimated total population of 45,380)