The Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University has developed, in collaboration with NJ DOT and NJ Transit, a tool that allows engineers to estimate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with specific transportation construction practices for both highway and rail projects. This includes estimating emissions from material inputs, construction equipment activity, life-cycle maintenance, project staging inputs (including emissions due to road closures during construction) over the lifetime of a project.

The United States is facing severe infrastructure financing problems. Revenues from fossil-fuel based taxes are declining as vehicles become more fuel efficient and as annual vehicle miles traveled declines. Many states and localities are increasing the role of private investors through public-private partnerships, and 31 states have now passed PPP enabling legislation. These concerns are particularly salient in the Northeastern part of the United States. Meanwhile, traffic safety, although improving, remains a critical concern in all regions.

Project Description

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.

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.

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.

Major State Departments of Transportation such as the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT) operate and maintain networks of thousands of miles of conduits, many carrying fiber optic cables that are vital to State communication systems. These conduits are located alongside highways and frequently must be located and marked to avoid damage from digging or boring resulting from construction. These conduits are part of a complex maze of facilities which include junction boxes where fiber optic cables get re-routed from one conduit segment to another.