ACCESS 41, Fall 2012
Robert Cervero
ACCESS is the face of the University of California Transportation Center. It is appreciated worldwide for its incisive commentary on transportation issues of the day and its nicely packaged summaries of cutting-edge UCTC research. This 41st issue of ACCESS is cause for celebration for it marks the magazine’s 20th anniversary. Hooray!
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Nicholas Lutsey
No industry, let alone the auto industry, asks to be regulated. And if just five years ago you told automotive insiders—industry executives, environmental advocates, and California regulators—that this is how it would turn out, nobody would have believed it.
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Vikash V. Gayah
One-way streets in downtown areas are receiving a critical look. City officials and urban planners have started a movement to convert downtown street networks from their traditional one-way operation to two-way operation. This effort seems to be largely successful—many cities (e.g., Denver, CO; Dallas and Lubbock, TX; Tampa, FL; Des Moines, IA; Salina, KS; Kansas City, MO; Sacramento, CA) have either recently made or are in the process of making such conversions. These conversions are intended to improve vehicular access and reduce driver confusion. Many additional factors go into this decision, but the general premise is clear: travelers and residents prefer two-way streets for a variety of economic and livability reasons, while traffic engineers and transportation planners believe that one-way streets serve traffic more efficiently.
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Gian-Claudia Sciara
During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Congressional earmarking played a larger role in federal transportation funding bills than ever before. Through earmarks, the US Congress directs federal funding to selected transport projects in specific places. Between 1994 and 2006, highway earmarks more than doubled. Notorious earmarks like Alaska’s Bridge to Nowhere and Florida’s Coconut Road together with fiscal pressures from the 2008 US economic crisis have led both the House and the Senate to adopt temporary earmark moratoria, calling time-out in the game of pork barrel politics.
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Kenneth A. Small and
Chen Feng Ng
The tremendous expense required for new urban road capacity has led policy analysts and decision makers to despair of “building our way out of traffic congestion.” But there is another route involving highway design that is relatively unexplored: designing more compact roads.
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Yunshi Wang,
Jacob Teter and
Daniel Sperling
In 2010, China surpassed the US and all other countries in vehicle sales, and will no doubt retain its number one ranking for decades. But how big will China’s vehicle market become? The answer is of great importance for the entire world. Rapid Chinese motorization has alarming implications for both the environment and global energy resources. China is already the world’s largest CO2 emitter and second-largest oil importer. Yet its vehicle ownership rates are still a fraction of those in the US—58 vehicles per 1,000 persons in 2010 compared to 804 per 1,000 in the US.
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Martin Wachs
California is contentiously debating whether or not to build a high speed rail system and, if so, how to build it and where to start. This debate reveals enormous differences among Californians. Surprisingly, it also suggests that planning studies and technical analyses increase, rather than resolve, our differences.