Hybrids electric vehicles (HEVs) have already been used in the NYMTC region for the past decade. HEVs involve increasing the efficiency of gasoline or diesel vehicles. For the NYMTC region, this entails more miles of travel to the gallon and cheaper fuel costs. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and New York City Transit (NYCT) have used hybrid vehicles for a significant amount of their fleet and will add more hybrid vehicles in the near future.

The New Freedom program (Section 5317) is a new Federal Transit Administration (FTA) program established under the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU). The program is designed to improve transportation services for individuals with disabilities by providing them with alternatives to public transportation outside of what the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 requires.

<p>The primary objective of this proposal is to develop a framework to identify the most likely source of rutting within the pavement system and the presence of mixture instability in the surface layer within the first few years of the pavement life. Currently, the only accurate method of identifying the source of rutting is to cut trenches and observe deformation in the various layers of the pavement structure, a process that is inconvenient, destructive, and expensive.