Residential On-Site Carsharing and Off-Street Parking Policy in the San Francisco Bay Area, Research Report 11-28

In light of rising motorization, transportation planners have increasingly supported alternatives to the indiscriminate use of the car. Off-street parking policy and carsharing have emerged as credible alternatives for discouraging car ownership. This report explores an initiative that could connect these policy fields and build on their synergy: the provision of on-site carsharing service in residential developments. It evaluates the performance of on-site carsharing programs in the San Francisco Bay Area by interviewing developers, planners, and carsharing service providers. Interviews were conducted in four Bay Area cities that support the provision of carsharing as an alternative to the private automobile. Based on these interviews, this report identifies the principal factors contributing to the success or failure of on-site carsharing: the unbundling status of off-street parking in residential developments; ties to off-street parking standards; financial constraints; and the level of coordination among stakeholders. The interviews revealed that on-site carsharing has been accepted by developers, planners, and service providers, particularly in densely-populated, transit-rich communities. Nevertheless, there appears to be a gap between on-site carsharing programs and off-street parking standards, and between carsharing programs and carsharing business operations. The authors recommend that a few models for establishing carsharing policy be tested: a model designed to serve high-density cities with traditional carsharing; and another designed to serve moderately-dense communities, with new carsharing options (e.g., peer-to-peer). In the case of the latter, trip reduction can be achieved through the promotion of alternative modes along major corridors

Amenity or Necessity? Street Standards as Parking Policy, Research Report 11-23

This paper explores the rationales underlying the use of minimum street width requirements to mandate street parking. A survey of 97 cities reveals that this mandate is not a technical necessity based on safety concerns or an amenity reflecting market demand, two common beliefs held by decision-makers. Many residents are likely unwilling to pay for street parking if it is unbundled from housing. The hidden parking policies should be made transparent and subject to public oversight, the double standard between private and public streets should be eliminated, and parking on residential streets should be optional

Dynamic Leadership: Toolbox for the Values-Based Entrepreneur

Four entrepreneurship models are proposed which lend guidance in the development of a business, from birth to exit, each examining ways to maintain the business founder’s initial vision and to continue to infuse values and ethical decision-making at each stage of development

Flow charts: visualization of vector fields on arbitrary surfaces

Journal ArticleWe introduce a novel flow visualization method called Flow Charts, which uses a texture atlas approach for the visualization of flows defined over curved surfaces. In this scheme, the surface and its associated flow are segmented into overlapping patches, which are then parameterized and packed in the texture domain. This scheme allows accurate particle advection across multiple charts in the texture domain, providing a flexible framework that supports various flow visualization techniques. The use of surface parameterization enables flow visualization techniques requiring the global view of the surface over long time spans, such as Unsteady Flow LIC (UFLIC), particle-based Unsteady Flow Advection Convolution (UFAC), or dye advection. It also prevents visual artifacts normally associated with view-dependent methods. Represented as textures, Flow Charts can be naturally integrated into hardware accelerated flow visualization techniques for interactive performance

Case Study on 3D Modeling and AMG Practices

The adoption of 3D modeling and automatic machine guidance (AMG) are becoming more popular in the transportation industry. With a 3D model uploaded to an on-board computer within a piece of heavy construction equipment, operators can easily monitor machine operations with respect to grad and location or engage the machine to produce the proper grade automatically. Thus, it provides great convenience and improved productivity for field workers. AMG and 3D modeling have been identified as enabling technologies for a Civil Integrated Management (CIM) system. When CIM is implemented, an entire transportation agency and stakeholder partners share in the use and development of a common data pool that is accessible to authorized users involved with all phases of a transportation facility life cycle (such as planning, design, construction, maintenance and rehabilitation) and all departments in the agency (Administration, finance, operation and others). The concept of CIM was developed and promoted by the United States Federal Highway Administration in 2013 and was established to make better use of accurate data and information that results from the utilization of advanced technologies and/or tools thus to facilitate more effective decision making for transportation projects. Using the CIM concept and framework, technologies such as 3D modeling and AMG could be more efficiently adopted within the full life cycle of a transportation facility. More importantly, data could be collected and managed systematically in the early phases of a project life cycle so they could be useful for later phases of the facility lifecycle. The purpose of this study is to investigate how CIM system could support autonomous construction and vice versa. During a domestic scan effort, seven state agencies and their contractors collaborated to present their extensive experiences on certain CIM related practices and tools. In particular, the experiences of the agencies that were under investigation regarding 3D modeling and AMG will be addressed in this paper. In addition, the benefits and challenges of using 3D modeling and AMG will also be discussed

The Bayesian Echo Chamber: Modeling Social Influence via Linguistic Accommodation

We present the Bayesian Echo Chamber, a new Bayesian generative model for social interaction data. By modeling the evolution of people's language usage over time, this model discovers latent influence relationships between them. Unlike previous work on inferring influence, which has primarily focused on simple temporal dynamics evidenced via turn-taking behavior, our model captures more nuanced influence relationships, evidenced via linguistic accommodation patterns in interaction content. The model, which is based on a discrete analog of the multivariate Hawkes process, permits a fully Bayesian inference algorithm. We validate our model's ability to discover latent influence patterns using transcripts of arguments heard by the US Supreme Court and the movie "12 Angry Men." We showcase our model's capabilities by using it to infer latent influence patterns from Federal Open Market Committee meeting transcripts, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance at uncovering social dynamics in group discussions.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, to appear in AISTATS 2015. Fixed minor formatting issue