Recent demographic trends suggest an increasing suburbanization of poor populations. Given that poor households are often unable to afford increasing housing prices in many urban areas they are increasingly moving to the suburbs. At the same time, suburbs often do not support the public transit needs of poor populations and access to jobs often with increasing commute time. Insufficient transit can also exacerbate recovery times after extreme weather events for vulnerable populations.

The objective of this project was to present an assessment of how social media is used to support the management of traffic operations during non-routine events. To accomplish this, the authors reviewed literature related to social media use for transportation, and for disasters and crises. Further, the team reviewed social media sites and data provided by various transportation agencies, in particular the messages related to traffic and non-routine events.

Social media has become an integral part of modern communication. There is however no clear consensus among transportation managers on how social media could or should be used to collect or disseminate actionable information. To provide guidance on the potential use of social media in transportation, a better understanding is needed of the message content as well as the path taken from the sender to the potential user of actionable information during crises and other non-routine events in the transportation system.

This project lays the foundation for building and exchange hub for locational and security data and risk assessment of potential excavation work.  It acts primarily at 2 stages: upstream of the mark-out process, as a decision support tool to help streamline, improve and guide the mark-out process, and downstream of the mark-out to gain and preserve information gained from such field verified data, and added intelligence to each utility asset management system related to the potential proximity of other utilities, and possible criticality of proposed construction activity in a given sit

Transportation planners and traffic engineers are increasingly turning to crash reduction factors to evaluate changes in road geometric and design features in order to reduce crashes. Crash reduction factors are typically estimated based on segmenting a highway and associating crashes with geometric features; this allows statistical methods to be applied to the data.

This project presents a comprehensive investigation about the network effects of MF to facilitate the developments of proper MF policies. After a practice scan and a review of the recent literature on MF, a multiclass mathematical programming with equilibrium constraint (MC-MPEC) is proposed to capture the optimal MF charging problem from a network perspective. The MC-MPEC problem is then solved and tested on two illustrative networks to show the MF network effect.

Public Private Partnership (P3) projects are likely to fundamentally impact entire transportation systems. However, most studies are focused on system modeling rather than policy analysis, and few studies have examined the impacts of P3s on real-size transportation networks. Policy guidance for devising and administering P3 contracts to improve transportation system performance while maintaining profitability is lacking.

This report develops a methodology for estimating the effects of different categories of overweight trucks on NYSDOT pavements and bridges. A data mining algorithm is used to categorize truck data collected at several Weigh-In-Motion stations around the state of New York based on the trucks’ adherence to the state’s legal weight limits. The data indicate that about 11% of the trucks traveling on New York highways may be carrying divisible load permits, 1% may be carrying special hauling permits, while about 6% may be illegally overweight.

Living snow fences (LSF) are a form of passive snow control designed to mitigate blowing and drifting snow problems on roadways. Blowing and drifting snow can increase the cost of highway maintenance and create hazardous driving conditions when snow is lifted off the ground by wind and transported toward a road. LSF disrupt wind patterns, causing blowing snow to be deposited in designated areas around the fence and away from the road.