In the News

Thousands of state workers are expected to begin commuting to Sacramento offices four days a week starting Wednesday, a shift transportation experts say will likely increase traffic, boost transit ridership and force many workers to rethink how they get to work.

A report says Nigeria’s endowment of lithium, copper and bauxite aligns precisely with the minerals needed to accelerate the country’s green energy transition.

A Cali­for­nia star­tup is try­ing to rein­vent the semitruck by mak­ing the gas-guzz­ling giants elec­tric, autonom­ous and designed for effi­ciency.

California’s Míocar program helps low-income residents find affordable rides that don’t contribute to smog or carbon pollution.

A major 2024 research report from Georgia Tech and the National Center for Sustainable Transportation found that after Atlanta opened its reversible express toll lanes on I‑75 and I‑85, peak‑period speeds jumped by roughly 20 mph in some areas.

The ongoing battle between President Donald Trump and very blue California continues. This time it’s the ongoing fight over the Golden State’s EV mandates.

“The primary problem on the highway was the mortality,” Fraser Shilling, who directs the Road Ecology Center, tells SFGate. “There’s truck traffic that goes through there, and they don’t slow down. They hit whatever’s on the road, so a lot of deer and elk were getting killed.”

Researchers across our campus are continuing these efforts to make transportation more sustainable, including the Institute of Transportation Studies, which is working with governments, NGOs, and other partners worldwide to reduce the climate footprint of automobiles in the developing world and here at home.

Why did three mule deer just cross Route 97 in Siskiyou County? The answer: California has built a new $20 million overpass dedicated for wildlife.

Within the last few days, a camera trap caught images of three mule deer using structure for the first time.

“This marks the first time wildlife have used the first-ever wildlife overcrossing in California,” said Fraser Shilling, director of the UC Davis Road Ecology Center. “It heralds a new era of wildlife overcrossings to improve wildlife connectivity."

Post-doctoral scholar Amy Lee at UC Davis’ Institute for Transportation Studies says the funds used for highway projects would have been more efficiently spent on improving public transport options such as light rail.

The National Center for Sustainable Transportation’s induced travel calculator is designed to estimate new vehicle miles traveled from expanded roadway capacity.

Dan Sperling, director emeritus of the University of California, Davis’ Institute for Transportation Studies and a former CARB board member, said the state’s EV policies have been emulated domestically and overseas, and rolling them back could hurt California’s standing as a global leader. And he argued that while electric vehicles have a higher sticker price, they are often cheaper to own in the long run than gas models that require more maintenance.

The next wave of EV growth will come from states where three conditions align: policy support, high gasoline prices, and low residential electricity prices.

Transportation funding has decreased for three main reasons and in this order: Inflation, fuel efficiency improvements, and the rise of EVs according to Allan Jenn, Associate Professor at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies.

Joel Löfving, PhD student at the Department of Environmental and Energy Sciences, recently spent six months at the University of California, Davis as a Fulbright scholar.

Americans still buy a lot of big pick-up trucks. On top of that, the Trump administration ended subsidies for electric vehicles and stopped enforcing fuel efficiency rules.

“If automakers aren’t making money from storage and not making money from EVs, they would prefer not to make money from storage because they’re not competing with their own gas car production,” says Gil Tal, who directs the EV Research Center at UC Davis’ Institute of Transportation Studies.

Policymakers constantly suggest that we need to spend billions of dollars and bulldoze countless acres of land to fix traffic jams. But do we?