Project Description

The objective of this project is to develop a model that assesses the importance of different transportation facilities using travel time as a measure of performance. This model will have potential applications in incident management and contingency planning of road works, and the impact of reduced capacity on links due to factors such as lane closures, accidents and external threats. It is anticipated that such a tool will be beneficial for government agencies such as NYSDOT, NYMTC and other private agencies.

Problem and Regional Significance. Extreme events of all kinds are increasing in either number or severity. Transportation provides vital support to people in such circumstances for evacuation and supplies, yet is often disabled in such disasters.

Local governments in the United States adopt the minimum street width requirement which is wide enough to provide one or two parking lanes on residential streets, making it a de facto parking policy.

The objective of this exploratory research is to investigate the potential of dynamic pricing to avoid unbalanced inventory in bicycle sharing systems, and therefore the needs for manual rebalancing of bicycles by truck. The proposed idea of dynamic pricing has been not used in the current practice, and the idea’s potential is unknown to the service providers. In this exploratory research, I will investigate the idea’s potential to eliminate manual rebalancing using an optimization model with demand learning process. The model will be validated with real data.

The global positioning system (GPS) has been increasingly used to gather data for transportation modeling and planning. However, the potential of this emerging technology and its combined power with other technologies such as wireless telecommunications, geographical information systems (GIS), and Internet have not been fully understood and utilized.

Warm mix asphalt (WMA) refers to asphalt concrete mixtures that are produced at temperatures approximately 40 to 70 ºF cooler than typically used in the production of hot mix asphalt. The goal with warm mix asphalt is to produce mixtures with similar strength, durability, and performance characteristics as hot mix asphalt but at substantially reduced production temperatures.

The highway transportation plays a very significant role in the nationwide economy and society development, including in UTRC2 area. For the routine traffic management and future planning of the highway infrastructure and other transport systems associated with it, a reliable traffic monitoring system is highly needed along the highways. Inductive loop is the most widely used method for the real-time traffic information nowadays. However, the cost-effective, convenient and reliable power supply needed for the traffic monitoring system is still a big challenge.

Many communities in the US and around the world—whether urban, rural, or suburban—are interested in providing effective paratransit services that are also reasonably good performers from the viewpoint of environmental sustainability. Herein, paratransit will be understood in the general sense of flexible passenger transportation that does not follow fixed routes or schedules, and often serves the transportation needs of the handicapped or elderly. Typically, paratransit systems exist because laws and regulations require the services to be provided, and because governments are able to provide the needed subsidies. Public or private operators who deliver paratransit services often do so via fleets of vans or mini-buses. Paratransit ranges widely in terms of the flexibility of the provided services, which can range from relatively inflexible transportation along a more or less defined route, to fully “demand responsive” service that offers door-to-door transportation, on-demand. Given the governmental subsidies needed to support paratransit, policymakers are increasingly considering ways to operate paratransit systems more effectively. Likewise, they are increasingly interested in the environmental sustainability of paratransit.

There is increased awareness towards vulnerabilities due to blast and other accidental damages to highway bridges since September 2001 attack on WTC in New York. Recent collapse of I-35 Bridge in Minnesota on August 1, 2007 has demonstrated psychological, societal and economic impacts of collapse of bridges in urban areas.