California State University, East Bay, China America Business and Education Center

Tianjin Municipal Government City Planning Program, March 14-20, 2005

Speaker: Steve Raney, Executive Director, Cities21.org

Title: Leading Edge Transportation Planning and Transportation

4MB PowerPoint Slides

This talk covers a variety of topics:

  1. “Walk to Work” Housing, where access to scarce housing is prioritize for those with the shortest commutes.
  2. Personal Rapid Transit (PRT). PRT is an elevated monorail system with many four-person driverless, electric vehicles. It is ideally suited short "feeder/distributor", shuttle, and "circulation" operations at train stations, airports, office parks, and shopping centers. PRT provides non-stop, no-wait, 30 mph service. PRT is an emerging technology under development in the U.S. (Minnesota: SkyWeb Express and Texas: Microrail), the United Kingdom (ULTra), and Korea (Steelmaker Posco’s Vectus subsidiary and Korea Railroad Research Institute).
  3. Group Rapid Transit (GRT). GRT is an elevated monorail system with 8 to 25-person vehicles. One system is under development in the San Francisco Bay Area (Cybertran).
  4. Dynamic hitchhiking enhanced with RFID and cell phones.
  5. Oil price spike "economic disaster" planning

Bio: Steve Raney is founder of Cities21.org, a nonprofit advanced transportation consultancy. He holds three masters: business, software, and transportation from Columbia, RPI, and Berkeley. He is the Principal Investigator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s "Transforming Office Parks into Transit Villages" study. He has conducted technology product research at Microsoft, Citigroup, and Silicon Valley start-ups. He was project manager for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system’s Group Rapid Transit study. He is the author of five Transportation Research Board (TRB) papers. His "wireless carpool assistant" is patent pending. His recent conference presentations include Intelligent Transportation Systems World Congress, Transportation Research Board, Association for Commuter Transportation, Engineers for a Sustainable World, and Rail~Volution.

Speaker: Wei Zhu, Transportation Engineering Graduate Student, U.C. Berkeley

Title: Sustainable Development in Tianjin Transportation Infrastructure.

6MB PowerPoint Slides

Part I: Why sustainable transportation is important to Tianjin. Covers Tianjin's social and economic role in China, Existing Transportation Infrastructure, Predicted Transportation demand, and the concept of sustainability. Part II: How to implement sustainability in Tianjin's transportation infrastructure. Discusses past success. Proposes solutions: Deploy Green Code on future construction, Enhance transportation management and traffic management, promote energy efficient automobiles, improve bike lanes, and improve city planning. This paper is informed by the recent U.C. Berkeley “planning studio” course on Tianjin and Berkeley collaborations with visiting scholars from Tianjin University Architecture School’s Urban Planning and Design Institute.

Bio: Currently Wei Zhu is in the process of obtaining her M.S. degree from U.C. Berkeley majoring in Transportation Engineering. She also holds a job as a graduate student researcher working for the Institute of Transportation Studies U.C. Berkeley.

Wei Zhu came to the U.S. studying Civil Engineering in January 2001. In December 2004, she graduated from San Diego State University with Summa Cum Laude. During her stay in Southern California, she practiced in various disciplinary areas of Civil Engineering such as Structural Engineering, Transportation Engineering, and Water Resources Engineering.

Before her journey in the U.S., she also worked in Jamaica for Esquel Group (a Hong Kong based multi-national textile manufacturing company) as a production administration executive and for Grace Kennedy Company Ltd. (one of the Caribbean's largest and most dynamic corporate entities) as a public relations representative.

She was originally from Suzhou City, Jiangsu Province, P.R. China.