Using Simulations to Investigate Travel, Lifestyle, and Economic Issues in New Towns Designed with a Dual Transportation Infrastructure

This project proposes that it is possible to build communities that accommodate strong preferences for auto-mobility and single-family homes, yet at the same time are much safer and cleaner, more pleasant, and more socially integrated than conventional suburbs. We accomplish this with a dual transportation infrastructure: the complete separation of fast, heavy vehicles (FHVs) from low-speed, low-speed, lightweight modes (LLMs; less than 25 mph top speed and 500 kg curb weight) on a city-wide scale. In a draft report (Delucchi et al, 2002) we delineate our dual-road-system plan and discuss and analyze some of its impacts on transportation problems. The potential environmental, social, and community benefits of the plan are clear. However, for these benefits to be realized, people must choose to live in such planned communities and to buy and use LLMs. Because there are no communities like the one we propose, one must use simulations to begin to understand how people might react to our plan. We seek STC funding to design and administer "pilot" household interviews, focus groups, and other group interviews to investigate: i) effective ways to represent or simulate life and travel in our plan; ii) how people react to various aspects of the plan; iii) the implications of our initial findings for developing the plan to maximize its appeal to households, and iv) the practical problem of how to start to build such towns as we propose.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Completed
• Funding: $54818.00
• Contract Numbers:

  R02-2

• Sponsor Organizations:

  California Department of Transportation

  1227 O Street
  Sacramento, CA  United States  95843
• Principal Investigators:

  Delucchi, Mark

• Start Date: 20071001
• Expected Completion Date: 0
• Actual Completion Date: 20090930
• Source Data: RiP Project 15023

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Communities; Infrastructure; Livability; Mobility; Neighborhoods; Research projects; Suburbs; Transportation planning
• Subject Areas: Economics; Planning and Forecasting; Research;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01464784
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: University of California Transportation Center/Institute of Transportation Studies
• Contract Numbers: R02-2
• Files: UTC, RIP, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Jan 3 2013 2:49PM