Phragmites australis plant growth and rapid expansion causes negative impacts including public safety and interference with New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) maintenance operations. More broadly, the growth and expansion of Phragmites australis interferes with NYSDOT’s Landscape Stewardship Policy to promote biodiversity. Current practices to control Phragmites australis include the application of herbicides followed by burning or mechanical removal of dead stalks.

Since September 11, 2001, the NYMTC Region has undergone profound transportation changes. These changes have impacted the Region’s infrastructure investments, the ability of the Region to sustain uniform State of Good Repair, and the ability to modernize its systems at a reasonable rate. Further, these changes occur during a period of increasing concern for resilience, attention to sustainability and a marked shift in population travel preferences. NYMTC, formed in 1982 originally addressed highway related issues, following mandates of the FHWA-UMTA joint regulations for planning.

Infrastructure monitoring, inspection, and management is one the nation’s top priorities in ensuring the aging infrastructure is in a state of good repair. Maintaining expected performance levels for various infrastructure elements has become increasingly challenging in recent years, due to a number of factors, two of which include limited availability of funding, and increased occurrence and severity of extreme weather events. In particular, over 21,000 bridges over water have been deemed scour critical in the United States, with the numbers expected to grow.

This proposal aims to take a critical look at how new technologies used by transit riders can transform transportation. We are interested in the question “What do riders do after they get travel information?” This research project will explore this question using a new “big data” source generated by travelers looking for real-time transit and shared-mobility information through a smartphone application called Transit App, as well as other large scale data sources.

Adverse weather conditions have a signicant impact on the safety, mobility, and eciency of highway networks. Annually, 24 percent of all crashes, more than 7,400 roadway fatalities, and over 673,000 crash related injuries were caused by adverse weather conditions between 1995 and 2005 [1]. In addition, weather contributed to 23 percent of all non-reoccurring delay and approximately 544 million vehicle hours of delay each year [2].

EPS geofoam blocks have been used as light weight material in a variety of geotechnical applications in the US and around the world for over 30 years. The large number of successful applications of geofoam and few notable failures were mainly designed by rule of thumb and shared experiences. Sensing of interface contact pressures and internal stresses in geofoam block installations in the field and in large size laboratory samples and models would be valuable for calibrating computer models and to improve design practice.

As communications technology innovations continue to rapidly transform retail supply chains, novel solutions are required to reduce transportation network impacts from ubiquitous last-mile shipments. In recent years, direct-to-home deliveries of household and consumer products have grown rapidly, requiring more vehicles carrying smaller shipment sizes to complete increasingly time-constrained movements to disparate destinations. Crowdshipping provides one potential approach to address resulting inefficiencies and redundancies in these local and last-mile deliveries.

Change in climate and our other environments is now putting transportation infrastructure alone the New York City (NYC) metro area’s coastline at a greater risk to extreme storm surges, which has been manifested during Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy in recent years. The objective of this project is to estimate potential hydrodynamics loads by such extreme surges on coastal bridges of the greater NYC area in predicted conditions of sea-level rise and recorded increase frequency of strong hurricanes.

This research will quantify the spatial impacts that demographics and economics have on public transit ridership. Previous research that attempted to investigate the relationship between ridership at a given transit stop and the social and economic characteristics of the neighborhood in which the transit stop is located have implicitly ignored spatial effects. In reality, we observe that the passengers embarking or disembarking at a given transit stop live, work, and recreate in both the immediate neighborhood as well as the adjacent neighborhoods.