• UTRC II SUBMISSION SYSTEM
  • Careers
  • Contact
  • Login / Register

Search form

Home
  • Home
  • About
    • Welcome to the UTRC Site
    • Theme
    • Staff
    • Board of Directors
    • Press
    • Annual Report
    • Program Progress Performance Report
    • Newsletter
  • Research
    • Projects
    • RFPs
    • Submit Your Proposal
    • Funding Categories
      • UTRC Research Initiative
      • UTRC Advanced Technology Initiative
      • UTRC Faculty Development Mini-grants
      • UTRC Best Transportation Paper Competition
      • News
  • Publications
  • Directory
    • Consortium Universities
    • Partners
    • Principal Investigators
    • Staff
    • Board of Directors
  • Education
    • Where to Study
    • Transportation and Planning Doctoral Series
    • AITE Scholarships
    • UTRC Dissertation Grants
    • Summer Institute
    • September 11th Memorial Program
    • Technology Transfer and Training
    • Online Graduate Certificate Program
    • UTRC Travel Grants
    • Student Award Recipients
    • Apply For Scholarships
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
    • Visiting Scholar Seminar Series
  • Resources

Analyzing Willingness to Improve the Resiliency of New York City’s Transportation System

Hurricane Sandy revealed the higher-risk vulnerability to natural hazards of civil infrastructure systems in coastal megacities such as New York. In particular, critical deficiencies in the NYC metropolitan area’s transportation system emerged after Sandy. Unfortunately, experts predict that future sea level rise and storms will exacerbate the problems caused by these deficiencies. There are thus several challenges to improving strength and resilience of transportation systems. In particular, preparedness, survival, and recovery require the identification of adequate funding sources to collect revenue for public investments to improve resilience of the systems under threat.

Traditional sources of funding for both recovering from disasters and preventing future damages are not only limited, but also do not account for benefit transfers of the externalities induced by the provision of resilient infrastructure. In principle, property owners should be willing to pay an amount equal to the perceived benefit, if this positive externality is internalized by them following some pricing mechanism. Monetizing these benefit transfers can be used as a tool not only to leverage scarce public resources, but also to achieve a socially optimal resource allocation. A key element is then the estimation of the willingness to pay for risk reductions, because this measure can be exploited to determine the cost share the community is willing to cover to secure infrastructure systems as well as to receive the benefits from minimizing potential damage. There is an open research question on how to properly express risks of extreme events, and how respondents of discrete choice experiments process information that involves infrequent but extremely damaging events.

This proposal requests funds to determine 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. A structural choice model will be derived aiming at a more general representation of decision-making under risk and uncertainty, using non-compensatory decision rules to determine the community’s willingness to pay for improvements in the resiliency to extreme events of the transportation system in New York City. Choice microdata will be collected in coastal communities in the NYC area, while aiming at advancing the state-of-the-art in choice modeling for addressing different attitudes toward risk.

Project Details

Project Type: 
UTRC Research Initiative
Project Dates: 
March 1, 2014 to December 31, 2015
Principal Investigators: 
Dr. Ricardo A. Daziano
Institution: 
Cornell University
Sponsor(s): 
University Transportation Research Center (UTRC)
Publications: 
Final Report
Project Brief
Project Status: 
Complete
Please subscribe to our Newsletter:

Get our newsletter

Please enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:

Contact Us

University Transportation Research Center
Marshak Hall - Science Building, Suite 910 
The City College of New York
138th Street & Convent Avenue ,New York, NY 10031