One of the primary goals of the United States Department of Transportation is to make the U.S. transportation system the safest in the world. In order to fulfill this goal it is important to understand how to improve highway safety for all users – including those users that may have different sensory inputs than the general population. In fact, some highway users belong to groups with special needs that have not been studied previously. The purpose of this proposed research is to initiate the creation of a body of knowledge regarding deaf and hard of hearing drivers.

Many state transportation agencies and research institutions are investing heavily to establish a Congestion Performance Management System (CPMS), which is mandated by the federal legislation, Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP 21, PL 112-141), and reaffirmed by the newly enacted Fix America Surface Transportation Act (FAST ACT 2015). The main elements of Congestion Performance Measures, such as travel time and speed, traffic volume, and length of roadway segments are usually not collected by a single entity, public or private.

The increasing traffic intensity on roads, highways, and railways requires that major investments be made to make transportation systems more livable and sustainable, especially in the UTRC Region II area. This is due to the high density population in the NYC Metropolitan area where the high speeds and a large capacity of vehicles and trains are highly desired. Such transportation systems create new technical and environmental challenges including noise and ground vibration, which affect ambient architectures, quality of life, and sustainability of the communities.

The exchange of information in a timely fashion is critical to accident prevention in transportation systems. Research has demonstrated that anticipating future collisions by as little as half a second before impact could lead to a 60% decrease in traffic accidents. Moreover, in July of 2015, researchers demonstrated a remote exploit of a commercially available vehicle from 10 miles away while it was on the highway, leading to the recall 1.4 million vehicles; this represents the first known automotive recall due to a cybersecurity vulnerability.

The objective of this research project is to deliver a real-time, adaptive evacuation system for cascading events (e.g., hurricanes, following flooding, and following aftershocks). To realize this goal, the PI will synthesize the existing information (e.g., flood inundation scenarios, human mobility information such as location-based social media data, U.S.

Over the last few years, bike-sharing systems have become a cost-effective, environmentally friendly alternatives for public transportation in many cities all over the world. On the one hand, the possibility of renting bicycles for short periods of time has given the users a new alternative for performing their daily commuting trips, a vibrant option of completing touristic loops, and a fast way of traversing a city in a healthy and exciting way.

This working paper serves as a starting point for a broader long-term research program on the socialization of travel in an information era. The focus is on the role social networks play in motivating resiliency in transportation infrastructures and their interdependence with other infrastructures. The concept of behavioral resiliency in traffic networks is characterized and further investigated as an outcome of social networks, their connectivity, strength of relations and key members.

Considerations to blast loading by potential terrorist attacks have been increased in structural designs since September 11. Essential government and transportation facilities as well as symbolic private sector buildings have been targets of terrorists. Publicly available approaches to designing structures against blast loadings are not suitable for such urban structures, because the approaches were developed mainly for military projects, in which certain stand-off distances can be maintained from publicly open streets.

Roadway systems in the United States have consistently been evaluated to have poor condition grades in the last two decades. According to American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) Infrastructure Report Cards, the overall condition scores of the roads in the United States have been fluctuating between a grade of "D -" and a "D+" since 1998 (ASCE 1998, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2013). The latest report card states that approximately one-third (32%) of the major roads in the U.S. are in poor or mediocre conditions (ASCE 2013). It is further added that 42% of the major urban highways in the U.S.

The objective of this proposal is to explore the role of visual information in determining the users’ subjective valuation of multidimensional trip attributes that are relevant in decision-making, but are neglected in standard travel demand models. The subjective valuation estimates that will be produced in this project –and the methodology proposed to produce those estimates– are relevant in assessing welfare improvements that come from a more efficient use of public space devoted to transportation.