The focus of this project was on supplying gasoline after a natural disaster. There were two aspects for this work: determination of which gas stations should be provided with generators (among those that do not have electric power) and determination of a delivery scheme that accounts for increased demand due to lack of public transportation and considerations such as equity. A Mixed-Integer Mathematical formulation was developed for this situation. Two case studies based on Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey are developed and solved in CPLEX.

The goal of this project is to provide statistical inference for the community’s willingness to pay for improvements in the resiliency to extreme events of the transportation system in New York City. This objective seeks to provide better tools for better informing planning investments to improve both resilience and security of transportation infrastructure and services.

Pedestrian safety is a critical element of urban transportation. A review of published literature, as well as real-world demonstration activities, indicate that bollard-level crosswalk lighting has excellent potential for enhancing pedestrian visibility and improving safety at crosswalks, particularly where the presence of a crosswalk might not be expected by approaching drivers.

Developing techniques for extracting information requires a good understanding of methods used to compress the traces. Many techniques for compressing trace data consisting of position (i.e., latitude/longitude) and time values have been developed. Since current vehicles are equipped with many on-board instruments, traces generated by such vehicles contain many attributes in addition to position and time. The problem of compressing such multi--atribute traces is currently being studied by a number of researchers.

Although the nuclear density method has been widely used in the compaction measurement of both soils and asphalt pavements, its accuracy for asphalt pavements is not as good as that for soils. Due to this issue, many disputes have incurred in construction projects, which resulted in replacement of the nuclear test method with the core sample method in many state DOTs for quality assurance or acceptance including the DOT Region II states. However, most contractors still use it on quality control as a fast and economic test method.

A new type of large-scale on-road energy harvester to harness the energy on the road when traffic passes by is developed. When vehicles pass over the energy harvesting device, the electrical energy can be produced by the mechanical motion even after the vehicle passed by, which solves the difficulty in regeneration energy from impulse vibration. Design approach and dynamics modeling are presented to reveal the working mechanism of the energy conversion.

Anonymous probe vehicle data are currently being collected on roadways throughout the United States. These data are being incorporated into local and statewide mobility reports to measure the performance of freeways and arterial systems. Predefined spatially located segments, known as Traffic Message Channels (TMCs), are spatially and temporally joined with probe vehicle speed data. Through the analysis these data, transportation agencies have been developing agency wide travel time performance measures.

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 most economical approach to maintain existing concrete bridges is by adopting an active preventive maintenance approach. An in-depth investigation of the combined deterioration effects of various deterioration mechanisms is needed to establish sound thresholds for harmful chemicals in concrete bridge elements.

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.