This project has developed a state-of-the-art GIS-based interactive tool for calculating network-wide full marginal costs (FMC) of highway transportation in New Jersey. The new tool is used to evaluate the short-term impacts of policy implications on the marginal costs of different trips.
Field experience indicates that wick drains installed vertically in grid fashion do not consistently result in the required degree of consolidation, under construction loading, in the time established in design. Such deviations are often related to variations in soil characteristics that are not fully identified due to limitations of soils investigation and testing.
Over the last decade, a large number of high capital cost transportation projects have been proposed for the New York City Region. Many have resulted from addressing evolving capacity needs, changes in regional demographics and economics, meeting the improvements necessitated by operating century old subway systems and recognizing the impact of moving freight in a dense region. But the catalyst for bringing all of these projects to the attention of the public and all regional agencies was the tragedy of September 11, 2001.
Investment in transportation infrastructure is generally regarded as an effective means for inducing economic growth and employment in a region. However, the ability of such investments to achieve these objectives, to a large extent, depends on the degree to which travel results from these investments support or conflict with present travel patterns and needs in this region.
In “The Retrofit Puzzle: Optimal Fleet Owner Behavior in the Context of Diesel Retrofit Incentive Programs” (1) an integer program was developed to model profit-maximizing diesel fleet owner behavior when selecting pollution reduction retrofits. Fleet owners acted in the context of potential government programs including various mandates and financial incentives. Fleet size and the miles remaining for each vehicle were treated as fixed and known at the time retrofits are made. Retrofits were assumed to take place in the present, but benefits and costs are distributed over time.
This paper reports on a natural experiment which studied groups of commuters who are equivalent in most important demographic respects, and who had equivalent commuting experiences, but were differentially affected by a new and improved mass transit (rail) route to work. These commuters changed a significant aspect of their commute, but did not change other critical aspects of their lives (e.g., the start and end points of the trips, the jobs they go to, the homes they return to), so that commuting changes were not confounded with other life changes.
The goal of this project has been achieved through three tasks. The main goal of Task I has been to identify appropriate sensors that have potential for bridge bearings applications. This has been achieved through the following subtasks and has been presented in this chapter:
Public transit system has become one of the targets of terrorist attacks using explosives, examples of which include the 1995 attack on Paris subway and the 2004 attack on Moscow subway. Under the present context of intense threats of terrorist attacks on subway systems in metropolitan areas around the world, explicit three-dimensional Finite Element method was used to investigate the dynamic response and damage of subway structures under internal blast loading. The study was motivated by the fact that explosion in subway structure may not only cause direct life loss, but also d
In recent years computer simulation has become one of the most widely used and powerful tools in providing synthetic versions of highway traffic. Traffic simulation allows us to understand the current network characteristics, and predict the likely impact of the desired system under various demands and network conditions, where physical experimentation is difficult or often impossible. In this context, computer simulation is a very helpful offline tool for testing the proposed system components prior to implementation.
Performance standards for Integrated Vegetation Management (IVM) can be used to define organizations that manage rights-of-way (ROWs) in environmentally-appropriate, socially-beneficial, and economically-viable manners. Environmentally appropriate ROW vegetation management means maintaining biodiversity, productivity, and ecological processes. Socially beneficial management means helping local people and society at large enjoy long-term benefits.
