Understanding how people will respond to new technologies and concepts is not an exact science. Yet this is exactly the information that transportation innovators and entrepreneurs need to bring new ideas to commercialization. Obtaining such information is a key objective of the California PATH Program's latest initiative: the Innovative Mobility Research (IMR) program. IMR researchers collect and analyze before-and-after data to provide industry, innovators, and policymakers with critical information about transportation projects' societal impacts.

IMR and the California PATH Program
The California PATH Program's Advanced Transportation Management and Information Systems (ATMIS) group, under the new leadership of California PATH Deputy Director Hamed Benouar, is reorganizing its research efforts into several new program areas based on clusters of expertise. The goal of this new program approach is to provide more modal choice and improve the transportation system's overall efficiency, safety, and security. This new approach will better address the mission and goals of PATH’s main partner and sponsor, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans -- www.dot.ca.gov).

The new program areas being developed will be managed by California PATH lead researchers in close collaboration with faculty and students across the State, government, and industry. The new research areas include: Innovative Mobility, Traffic Management, Public Transit, and Systems Management (which incorporates benefit and cost analysis, planning, and ITS decision support). The Innovative Mobility program, led by Dr. Susan Shaheen, is the first to reach final shape. It will serve as a model for the other new program areas.

Premise
Innovative Mobility is based on the premise that transportation systems can facilitate mobility by providing a variety of modes that people can choose from when making trips, modes that can be competitive with the private automobile. Innovative Mobility services enable users to evaluate costs, convenience, and impacts before making a modal choice.

California PATH's Innovative Mobility Research program (IMR) conducts research into advanced technologies and mobility solutions that could create more transportation options and improve connectivity among different transportation modes, while minimizing transportation systems' negative societal and environmental impacts. Research conducted at IMR evaluates the options that consumers might choose for transportation and offers impartial information for policymaking decisions and the commercialization of mobility services and technologies.

Goal
The goal of this research is to help industrial leaders, policymakers, and innovators to gain crucial early information about new technologies and ideas. IMR specializes in designing custom programs to test emerging mobility technologies and concepts, and in executing comprehensive, state-of-the-art evaluations to understand these technologies and concepts, their societal impacts, user interfaces, and business models.

Based at the Center for Commercialization of Intelligent Transportation System Technologies (CCIT) in Berkeley, IMR has grown from four to twelve research team members (including numerous UC students) and has established several new promising industry partnerships. Hamed Benouar, who also serves as the Executive Director of CCIT, is pleased that CCIT has been able to provide an arena for new private members of CCIT, such as ParkingCarma and Segway LLC, to collaborate with IMR on research projects and to access Center benefits.

Research Projects
IMR is committed to facilitating the development, deployment, and adoption by consumers of innovative mobility services. Researchers design projects and conduct evaluations, principally in California, but nationally and internationally as well. Each effort focuses on understanding user behavior, developing new business models, and testing advanced technologies. IMR's current research areas are: shared-use vehicle systems (carsharing, station cars, shared bikes, and Segway Human Transporters), innovative mobility and smart growth, and smart parking management. IMR's current projects are described below.

CarLink (www.gocarlink.com)
The Carlink II project, building on experience from CarLink I (see below), deployed a fleet of twenty Honda Civics at the California Avenue Caltrain Station in Palo Alto that were shared by commuters. The pilot ran from August 2001 until June 2002, and has been successfully transitioned to a third party operator. Final analysis of the pilot will be completed in early 2004.
Project Partners: California PATH, Caltrans, American Honda, ITS-Davis, Caltrain, and Stanford Business Park.

CarLink I was a commuter-based carsharing pilot that ran between 1999 and 2000 at the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District Dublin/ Pleasanton Station, employing a fleet of twelve natural gas Honda Civics and smart carsharing technologies.
Project Partners: ITS-Davis, Caltrans, American Honda, California PATH, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Smart Mobility Model Initiative
Smart growth, including access to transit with safe pedestrian and bicycle facilities, has been shown to reduce automobile use. IMR is evaluating the links among smart growth; urban design based on compact, multi-use, people-friendly communities; and innovative mobility in the Sacramento-Davis region. The first phase of this research is well underway (transportation modeling, expert interviews, and focus groups).
Project Partners: California PATH, UC Davis campus, Caltrans, and ITS-Davis.

Smart Parking Management (with ParkingCarma)
Parking is a 26 billion dollar industry in the United States. Parking availability influences how individuals commute, impacting transit use, single occupancy vehicle driving, and traffic congestion. Smart parking approaches range from dynamic displays on roadway signs telling drivers about parking lot location and capacity, to the use of the Internet and cell phones to provide information about space availability, location, and pricing.

IMR's Smart Parking Project is a pilot program that taps into communication technologies to help manage existing parking spaces at and around a BART station to increase space availability and transit access. IMR will evaluate smart parking management technologies and services to assess their potential to improve parking access (especially at transit stations), optimize parking space, and reduce congestion.
Project Partners: California PATH, Caltrans, BART, and ParkingCarma.

Enhancing BART Connectivity with the Segway
Human Transporter
IMR is researching the use of the Segway Human Transporter (HT) as a device to improve connectivity to transit and for short trips (serving as an alternative to the private automobile). Institutional issues under investigation include use of the Segway HT on sidewalks.

Central to this examination are safety issues associated with the introduction of the Segway HT on sidewalks for surrounding pedestrians and users. Other research areas include regulatory analysis of national, state, and local ordinances governing the introduction and use of the Segway HT on sidewalks, a shared-use business model, and training/deployment. This project also examines other low-impact modes and pedestrian interactions, such as wheelchairs, bicycles, scooters, and in-line skates.
Project Partners: California PATH, Caltrans, BART, Segway LLC, and DeweySquare.

Innovative Mobility Research
We invite you to meet the IMR team and learn more about the projects at www.innovativemobility.org. Additionally, you can learn more about CCIT at www.calccit.org

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