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Volvo awards $2.4 million for new center at ITS
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Two
of the themes of the new Berkeley ITS Center of Excellence
in Future Urban Transport will be designing transportation
services for urban areas and easing congestion.
PHOTO COURTESY UC TRANSPORTATION CENTER |
A team of researchers from Berkeley’s
Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) has been awarded a five-year,
$2.4 million grant to establish a Center of Excellence in Future
Urban Transport by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations.
Eight ITS faculty from CEE and the Department of City and Regional
Planning (CRP) will team up to investigate the interaction between
technology and policy in urban transportation, particularly sustainable
transportation strategies.
The center is one of two funded this year, following an international
competition that attracted proposals from some of the world’s
foremost transportation research centers.
"This is an excellent opportunity to help improve cities
around the globe by advancing and testing new ideas in a collaborative
research environment," said Carlos Daganzo, the Robert Horonjeff
Professor of CEE and the center’s principal investigator.
Research will focus on the interdependence of policy and technology—how
new technologies can shape policy and vice versa—in order
to develop a deeper understanding of how policy and technology
should be integrated in proposed solutions.
The researchers set forth several themes that will drive their
work, including balance between mobility and accessibility, tailoring
transportation services to urban settings, the role of telecommuting
and wireless communication in facilitating urban transport, and
sophisticated strategies for mitigating congestion. The research,
the proposal said, should be "guided by a city's vision of
its own future."
In addition to Daganzo, other participants in the center are CEE
professors Michael Cassidy, Arpad Horvath, Samer Madanat, Raja
Sengupta, and Alexander Skabardonis, and CRP professors Robert
Cervero and Elizabeth Deakin.
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