In the News

“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.

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.

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.

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?

“Making sure public transport can meet the mobility needs of residents is step one,” says Alissa Kendall, the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis. “If travel is prohibitively slow, if it doesn’t get you to where you need to go, it will never encourage those wealthy enough to own and operate a car to stop buying and using them – and it won’t serve the needs of those who are transit dependent.”

India has recognized that critical minerals are a central pillar of its energy security, industrial strategy and geopolitical positioning.

Sacramento’s $500M FIX50 project nears completion, but UC Davis expert Susan Handy questions whether it will ease Highway 50 congestion.

“When people travel abroad, they always talk about what a phenomenal experience the public transit is, it blows their minds,” said Kari Watkins, a transit expert at the University of California, Davis. “The difference to the US is so obvious. Yet we are still such a car-centric society – change hasn’t played out politically.”

California officials said the state has formalized collaboration through memoranda of understanding with Kenya and Nigeria to advance clean transportation and climate action. The agreements establish a framework for cooperation in zero-emission transportation, sustainable freight, clean energy innovation, workforce development and knowledge sharing.

“An economist would tell you, you know, just put a tax on diesel fuel or a tax on diesel trucks and let the market figure it out. But our Legislature would never do that,” he said. “We’re left with using these regulatory tools, which are a little clunky and difficult to implement in a way that is fair, effective and timely.”

“The only thing that reduces roadkill is fencing, and so a way that wildlife crossings can indirectly result in less roadkill is because they almost always have fencing associated with them,” Shilling said.

The Chinese automaker is racing ahead of global competitors—but don’t expect to see those gains in the US anytime soon.

“There is a movement in the industry to revert back to knobs,” Sperling said, noting that a lot of consumers prefer physical controls and consider them safer." ..."I think it’s pretty widely accepted that distraction has become a greater cause of crashes than before.”

“We should seriously look at how we can encourage small numbers of Chinese EVs to come to California,” said Dan Sperling, a former California Air Resources Board member and director emeritus of the University of California, Davis’ Institute for Transportation Studies.