Project Objective

New York’s northern and western borders with Canada have long served as important commercial and tourist gateways for the entire United States. With recent and projected growth in cross-border travel, and heightened security concerns arising from the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the transportation infrastructure in the border regions is being pushed to its limits.

Air quality has become one of the important factors to be considered in making transportation improvement decisions. Thus, tools are expected to help such decision-making. On the other hand, MOBILE5 model, which has been widely used in evaluating air quality improvement, become helpless when the transportation improvements are sensitive to factors such as acceleration/deceleration, grade, etc. which are not modeled in MOBILE5 model. For example, improvement can be made to reduce the grade of a ramp, thus reduce high acceleration and deceleration.

Project Objective

Rising light rail capital costs are a significant concern for the Federal Transit Administration and for its partner agencies at the local level. The report discusses three distinct types of cost growth: cost overruns, unit cost escalation, and project escalation. Specific factors that push costs higher include lack of in-house expertise, regulatory mandates, poor or non-existent competition among vendors, and the use of custom designs.

Problem Statement

State-of-the-art technology is available which incorporates shredded scrap tire rubber known as crumb rubber modifier (CRM) as a modifier for asphalt cement in paving mixtures. CRM is the general term to describe all rubber particles obtained from the shredded of discarded tires which are reduced up to a size of 6.35 mm. Two technologies are most commonly used to incorporate crumb rubber in asphalt pavement applications, namely, the wet and dry process.

The essence of planning is a comprehensive analysis of the impacts of policies, programs and projects upon the system under consideration and its socio-economic environment. In transportation planning, this concept translates into the consideration of the interactions among multiple transportation modes, and between transportation and land use, the economy and the environment. In this overall context, analytical transportation planning relies on the use of models to assess the impacts of the proposed alternatives.

Objectives for the proposed research and assessment program are as follows, as provided in the problem statement provided by NYSDOT (modified slightly after NYSDOT 2002):

1.   Evaluate the current vegetation management program and "Alternatives to Herbicide" program