This research, addressing the areas of Inclusive Advanced Technology Application and Climate Resilient Infrastructure, will evaluate a set of proof-of-concept transportation resilience measures to determine their utility and scalability as state and local performance measures. The research will review the latest scientific literature on risk and resilience measures to catalog methodologies scoring road network assets based on road segment attributes, hazard intersections, network centrality, and accessibility.

Stormwater flooding has emerged as a major challenge in urban areas due to its widespread and adverse impacts on transportation and the normal functioning of the economy. It can also cause loss of life. To predict the depth and duration of flooding at a specific locale, one could use the tools developed for river flooding (due to backwater). These include accurately mapping the terrain and running hydrologic software such as SWMM or HEC-HMS followed by hydraulic engineering software such as HEC-RAS. However, due to the high number of flooding locations, such a task is cost prohibitive.

Currently, asphalt mixtures are design using volumetric concepts to determine optimum asphalt content levels with no means of verifying mixture performance prior to field production and placement. A new design methodology called Balanced Mixture Design (BMD) promotes the use of evaluating and design asphalt mixture using rutting and fatigue cracking methods and criteria to achieve an optimum asphalt content that will result in an asphalt mixture performing well in rutting and fatigue cracking scenarios – thereby “balancing” the asphalt mixture performance.

While Manhattan’s streets may be the most congested—and carbon-emitting—in the country, the subway system that runs beneath them offers an inspiring example of how efficiently—and with what minimal emissions of greenhouse gases—passengers can be transported. Although the collection and transport of municipal solid wastes produces only a fraction of the congestion and emissions on Manhattan’s surface, in absolute terms the hundreds of thousands of annual truck miles these wastes cause are nonetheless quite significant.

The environmental and economic impacts of New York State’s waste-management system could be dramatically reduced by (a) decreasing the number of truck miles required to collect waste and (b) decreasing the demand for long-distance transport to remote disposal facilities.