Driving Transportation Research
by David Pescovitz
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Directed by Carlos F. Daganzo, the Volvo Centre will incorpoate research conducted by eight ITS faculty members drawn from the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional planning. (David Pescovitz photo)
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Imagine that every time you drove into the heart of your city's downtown you had to pay a small fee. How would traffic be affected if that fee shifted predictably by time-of-day depending on the congestion in the city center? This is one of the ideas that UC Berkeley researchers hope to test drive in a new international center dedicated to the future of urban transportation policy and technology. The Volvo Research and Educational Foundations recently awarded $2.4 million over five years to the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation to establish this Centre of Excellence.
"This is about technology pull rather than push," says Civil and Environmental Engineering professor Carlos Daganzo, principal investigator for the Volvo Centre. "We would like to come up with policies that might make cities better and then try to create the technologies that allow those policies to be put into place."
Data from loop detectors (the six large circles on the road) can be used to measure the speed and number of cars on the freeway. (courtesy PATH)
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The Volvo Centre will collaborate with institutes and governments around the world to ensure that "the research is guided by a city's vision of its own future." For example, advanced traffic monitoring systems could lead to dynamic policies for controlling traffic and easing gridlock. These policies, Daganzo explains, would combine conventional traffic engineering tools such as signal timing and parking control with smart pricing schemes. Meanwhile, new wireless data services could help manage traffic flow and inform drivers about what they'll face on the road ahead. Even seemingly simple policy changes--restricting the times that freight delivery trucks can enter urban centers, for example--can have dramatic impact on traffic flow.
"Cities are very complex systems," Daganzo says. "If you do something small in one place, patterns may change all over. Yet despite this complexity, some macroscopic responses can be predicted."
The key to success, he explains, is accurately forecasting whether a new policy will work at the macroscopic level and measuring its performance after it's put into place. That involves building better methods to predict and monitor traffic.
"Right now, people don't have the data to run effective micro-simulations with enough precision to really try out policies," Daganzo says.
To that end, one of Daganzo's pet projects is modeling the ebb and flow of traffic in a bustling city. In his eyes, "city physics" are strikingly similar to the physics of, say, gas in a piston. Physicists, he explains, use mathematics to precisely predict behavior on the macroscopic level without knowing all the microscopic details. Daganzo believes his mathematical models can do the same thing for urban traffic without requiring the location or destination of every car. He's optimistic that his theories are correct, but now he needs to develop them further and, of course, check his work against reality.
Eventually, Daganzo hopes the Centre can work with several cities around the globe to instrument roadways with sensors that collect data on the number and speed of vehicles. Teams of Berkeley researchers are exploring various traffic-monitoring techniques, from strategically-located cameras to "loop detector" sensors buried in the asphalt. Once the cities are instrumented, the researchers' predictions can be compared to data from the real world. Even if those models prove invalid, Daganzo points out, instrumenting cities is still beneficial as it will provide instantaneous data on the effectiveness of new traffic management policies.
"We need the feedback mechanism to tell us whether we're on the right track or not," Daganzo says. 'Then we'll be able to determine whether the policies and technologies we develop at the Centre for one city will work in other places with similar problems."
Carlos F. Daganzo's home page
Institute of Transportation Studies
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