Transportation fuel is an important component of household budgets, as 3.3% of total household expenditures are for vehicle fuel nationwide and over 50% of annual household expenditures on energy are for transportation. These average values vary geographically, and higher energy cost burdens are faced by households with lower incomes. Defining transportation energy affordability burden as the percentage

Transportation agencies utilize key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the performance of their traffic networks and business processes. To make effective decisions based on these KPIs, there is a need to align the KPIs at the strategic, tactical, and operational decision levels and to set targets for these KPIs. However, there has been no known effort to develop methods to ensure this alignment

Understanding speed selection behavior of drivers following speed limit increases is critically important. To date, the literature has largely focused on freeways and the effects of speed limit changes on two-lane highways remains under researched. Prior research has generally focused on changes to mean speeds, although the speeds of both the highest and lowest drivers are also of great interest. This

Proper inspection of small culverts can prevent roadway failures, traffic disturbances, and save tens of thousands of dollars on costly repairs. The Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans) has adopted a policy that requires all culverts to be inspected every 5 years. Because of this, approximately 9,600 small culverts must be inspected annually. In this study, a lightweight inspection vehicle was

Concrete median barriers are designed to mitigate serious cross-median crashes by preventing penetration of errant vehicles into oncoming traffic. When implemented in flood-prone areas, however, solid concrete median barriers can act as a dam to floodwaters, as recently seen in the U.S. in Texas during Hurricane Harvey, or in Louisiana and Pennsylvania following severe storms. This raises the height

The use of mobile phones while driving has been a hot topic in the field of driving safety for decades. Although there are few studies on the influence of gesture control on in-vehicle secondary tasks, this study aims to investigate the impact of gesture-based mobile phone use without touching while driving from the perspective of multiple-resource workload owing to visual, auditory, cognitive, and

Engineered material arresting system (EMAS) is a cellular concrete material currently used as passive aircraft arresting system at airports around the U.S.A. and abroad. Its cellular structure crushes on impact, helping to absorb energy and create drag resistance. Energy absorbed during crushing is defined by the load–deformation response curve, in which a plateau is indicative of crushing behavior

Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication is essential for reliable deployment of connected automated vehicle technology, contributing to the advanced safety and optimization of our transportation networks. However, supplying and maintaining necessary wireless infrastructure is a challenging task, particularly when it comes to rural areas. This study proposes a novel methodology that uses artificial

The roadway infrastructure constantly deteriorates because of environmental conditions, but other factors such as exposure to heavy trucks exacerbates the rate of deterioration. Therefore, decision-makers are constantly searching for ways to optimize allocation of the limited funds for repair, maintenance, and rehabilitation of New Jersey’s infrastructure. New Jersey legislation requires operators

Roadway tunnels often include a reinforced concrete drop ceiling that is hung from the liner to create a plenum that facilitates ventilation and houses utilities. Drop ceiling panels are lightweight compared with the much thicker tunnel liner and can experience significant damage from a fire on the roadway below. This paper examines the flexural response of drop ceiling panels in two representative

The Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) employs a simple five-point system to assess the quality of bikeway pavement as part of the comprehensive bicycle level of service (LOS) evaluation. Unfortunately, the ambiguous and rudimentary nature of the existing HCM Pavement Quality Index (PQI) fails to offer an objective review of bikeways across different jurisdictions. In the following analysis, first is an

The rapid development of connected vehicle (CV) and cooperative automated vehicle (CAV) technologies in recent years calls for the assessment of the impacts of these technologies on system performance. Microscopic simulation can play a major role in assessing these impacts, particularly during the early stages of the adoption of the technologies and associated applications. This study develops a method

With rapid growth in on-demand delivery, ridehailing, and shared mobility use, cities are observing dramatic increases in demand for curbspace. In response, cities and private companies have proposed a diverse range of structural, policy and technology solutions to manage the curb lane more efficiently. Through structured interviews with public agency and private company staff and a review of existing

Monitoring nonmotorized traffic is becoming increasingly common practice at local and state departments of transportation. These travel activity data are necessary to monitor the system and track progress toward active transportation policy and program goals. A common problem is that permanent count site data are often missing, making those sites less useful. Being able to accurately estimate those

Road pavements may be subjected to deterioration problems caused by excessive traffic loads, thousands of load repetitions, environmental and climatic conditions, freeze-thaw effects, and insufficient design of mixtures. The formation of reflective cracks is the most common structural problem that occurs on a road’s superstructure over time. Special applications requiring expensive geosynthetics, such

This work identifies factors that influence crash occurrence within a traffic analysis zone (TAZ) by accounting for location-specific effects and serial correlation in longitudinal crash data. This is accomplished by applying a random effect negative binomial (RENB) model. Unlike commonly used count models such as Poisson and negative binomial (NB), RENB accounts for heterogeneity and serial correlation

In Brazil, neglect and lack of data have complicated urban freight transportation planning. Belo Horizonte is one such example, where the administration’s disregard for urban freight transport has led to multiple negative externalities. Using the maximum entropy method, this study analyzed the influence of urban planning factors on warehouse location in the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Region. Warehouse

Move-over laws are intended to enhance the safety of road agency and law enforcement personnel who are working on or near the roadway. This study examined driver behavior through a series of field studies where these types of vehicles were located on the outside shoulder of a freeway with their lights activated. The study also evaluated the use of upstream dynamic message signs (DMS) to discern whether

Crack sealing is one of the most commonly used methods to preserve asphalt pavements. However, quantification of crack sealing benefits (or the long-term delaying effects of crack sealing on crack propagation) remains unavailable because field crack lengths could not be measured accurately and efficiently. In this study, 3D laser technology is proposed to measure and compare the growth of crack lengths

During railway operations unexpected events may occur, influencing normal traffic flows. This paper focuses on a train rescheduling problem in a railway system with seat-reserved mechanism during large disruptions, such as a rolling stock breakdown leading to some canceled services, where passenger reassignment strategies have also to be considered. A novel mixed-integer linear programming formulation

Transportation agencies should measure pavement performance to appropriately strategize road preservation, maintenance, and rehabilitation activities. The international roughness index (IRI), which is a means to quantify pavement roughness, is a primary performance indicator. Many attempts have been made to correlate pavement roughness to other pavement performance parameters. Most existing correlations

This research aims to understand temporal, regional, demographic, and policy factors that influenced travel reduction within the contiguous United States during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Particularly, this research combines U.S. Census data, infection rates, and state-level mandates to determine their effects on daily, county-level vehicle miles traveled (VMT) estimations from March

Ridehailing services (e.g., Uber or Lyft) may serve as a substitute or a complement—or some combination thereof—to transit. Automation as an emerging technology is expected to further complicate the current complex relationship between transit and ridehailing. This paper aims to explore how US commuters’ stated willingness to ride transit is influenced by the price of ridehailing services and whether

Pedestrian safety is an important public health issue for the United States, with pedestrian fatalities representing approximately 16% of all traffic-related fatalities in 2016. Nationwide, transportation agencies are increasing their efforts to implement engineering-based improvements that increase pedestrian safety. These agencies need statistically rigorous crash modification factors (CMFs) to demonstrate

Many state highway agencies (SHAs) have adopted pay adjustment provisions in their acceptance plans for construction and materials. In these payment adjustment acceptance plans, the percentage of material within specification limits (PWL) has been selected as the quality measure to relate production quality to pay factors, and pay equations are used to determine a pay factor for a lot based on PWL

Effective parking policy is essential for cities to reduce the demand their road networks experience and to combat their carbon footprints. Existing research in the application of machine learning to understand parking behavior assumes that cities have prohibitively expensive stationary parking sensors installed, while no research has yet attempted to use machine learning to impute for parking behavior

Zonal express is an operational strategy for express transit service that only stops in the initial and final zones of its route while skipping stops in-between. Zonal express provides a service with less travel and transfer time by aggregating trip demands with similar origins, destinations, and departure times. In this study, new zonal express routes are designed to reduce the travel and transfer

Reliability and punctuality are the key evaluation criteria in railway service for both passengers and operators. Delays spanning over spatial and temporal dimensions significantly affect the reliability and punctuality level of train operation. The optimization of capacity utilization and timetable design requires the prediction of the reliability and punctuality level of train operations, which is

For transportation system analysis in a new space dimension with respect to individual trips’ remaining distances, vehicle trips demand has two main components: the departure time and the trip distance. In particular, the trip distance distribution (TDD) is a direct input to the bathtub model in the new space dimension, and is a very important variable to consider in many applications, such as the

Estimating passengers’ door-to-door travel time, for journeys that combine walking and public transit, can be complex for large networks with many available path alternatives. Additional complications arise in tap-on only transit systems, where passengers alightings are not recorded. For one such system, the Chicago Transit Authority, this study compares three methods for estimating door-to-door travel

Congestion and traffic-induced air pollution are associated with population growth and economic development. Compared with congestion, there are relatively few studies on modeling and assessment of traffic-induced pollution. This paper presents an empirical assessment and analysis of traffic-induced air pollution with real-world data collected from the Hong Kong Strategic Road Network. The study employed

Transportation agencies monitor freeway performance using various measures such as VMT (vehicle-miles traveled), VHD (vehicle-hours of delay), and VHT (vehicle-hours traveled). They typically rely on data from point detectors to estimate these freeway performance measures. Point detectors such as inductive loops cannot capture the travel time for a corridor, leading to inaccurate performance measure

Each year, about 200 children aged 14 years old (y/o) or less die and another 4,000 are physically injured while being driven by an adult that has been drinking (aged 21 y/o or more). Concerned by this phenomenon, there are a growing number of States implementing Driving Under the Influence – Child Endangerment (DUI-CE) laws to prevent adults from driving under the influence with children. These laws

Fatigue cracking caused by repeated heavy traffic loading is a critical distress in asphalt concrete pavements and is significantly affected by the selected binder. In recent years, the growing use of recycled asphalt materials has increased the need for the production of softer asphalt binder. Various modifiers/additives are marketed to adjust the grade and/or enhance the binder performance at high

Indian Railways is the world’s largest government-owned monopoly, annually carrying passenger numbers that surpass the global population. It is world’s fourth largest rail network after the U.S.A., China, and Russia, and is managed by a separate Ministry of Railways. The operating ratios have consistently been around 90% in the past several years, indicating that that the capability to generate operational

In recent years, trials of autonomous shuttle vehicles have been conducted worldwide. Currently, there exists no generalized process model for deployment and continuous operation of shuttles. Shuttle suppliers use their own developed procedures, making it difficult for the relevant stakeholders (e.g., public authorities) to assess the risk of potential shuttle deployment. The Digibus® Austria flagship

This paper reports on the results of an evaluation of a rear-end and pedestrian crash warning system installed on transit agency buses with the goal of collecting and providing information to help agencies make decisions about investing in such systems. The results from this evaluation indicate that the tested crash warning system had a positive effect on improving the reaction times to rear-end and

The COVID-19 pandemic, the most significant public health crisis since the 1918–1919 influenza epidemic, is the first such event to occur since the development of modern transportation systems in the twentieth century. Many states across the U.S. imposed lockdowns in early spring 2020, which reduced demand for trips of various types and affected transportation systems. In urban areas, the shift resulted

Accurate prediction of network-level traffic parameters during inclement weather conditions can greatly help in many transportation applications. Rainfall tends to have a quantifiable impact on driving behavior and traffic network performance. This impact is often studied for low-resolution rainfall data on small road networks, whereas this study investigates it in the context of a large traffic network

Conducting hazardous materials (HAZMAT) commodity flow studies (CFS) is crucial for emergency management agencies. Identifying the types and amounts of hazardous materials being transported through a specified geographic area will ensure timely response if a HAZMAT incident takes place. CFS are usually conducted using manual data collection methods, which may expose the personnel to some risks by them

Dark lighting conditions, including those occurring at dawn and dusk, are correlated with increased nonmotorist crash frequency owing to reduced visibility, but little research has been done that investigates the spatial relationship between roadway lights and nonmotorist crashes on a community scale. This research used kernel density estimation methods to calculate the commonalities between geolocated

The 6th edition of the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM6) introduced a methodology for estimating and forecasting arterial travel time (TT) distributions (TTD) and their associated travel time reliability (TTR) metrics. Recently, it was shown that the HCM6 severely underestimated both the TTD and the TTR metrics for a test network in Lincoln, NE, U.S. Subsequently, it was shown that the underestimation

Road user costs (RUCs) have been studied for the past few decades and still need to be considered to obtain a complete picture of the impact of road construction, maintenance, and rehabilitation. RUCs comprise delay costs (value of time), vehicle operating costs, and accident costs. Federal Highway Administration’s Life Cycle Cost Analysis software RealCost has been adapted, customized, and enhanced

The city of Mumbai has grown at an unprecedented rate, increasing the burden of mobility on its core public transport system, the Mumbai suburban railway network. The system is likely failing from “over-optimization,” with stations not designed to cater to the needs of a rapidly growing city, which has led to a steady surge in fatalities over the years, primarily in the metropolitan region beyond the

This paper proposes a market segmentation method applied in the field of transportation behavior change using GPS trajectories and socio-demographic data collected from the advanced demand management system “GoEzy” designed by Metropia. User attributes are extracted using several statistical methods such as dynamic time warping, density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN),

Sudden passenger demand at a bus stop can lead to numerous passengers gathering at the stop, which can affect bus system operation. Bus system operators often deal with this problem by adopting peer-to-peer service, where empty buses are added to the fleet and dispatched directly to the stop where passengers are gathered (PG-stop). However, with this strategy, passengers at the PG-stop have a long

Shared dockless e-scooters were first launched in Paris in the summer of 2018. These services were met with mixed reception: although some praised them for offering a new mobility solution to urban dwellers, others soon questioned their environmental impact. An emerging body of literature using lifecycle analysis shows that shared e-scooters are more pollutant than walking, cycling, and public transportation

A thermomechanical coupling between a hyper-viscoelastic tire and a representative pavement layer was conducted to assess the effect of various temperature profiles on the mechanical behavior of a rolling truck tire. The two deformable bodies, namely the tire and pavement layer, were subjected to steady-state-uniform and non-uniform temperature profiles to identify the significance of considering temperature

This work presents an approach for collecting road surface data using connected vehicles. Road surface readings from multiple production vehicles were collected and aggregated to estimate road roughness measured by the International Roughness Index (IRI). The analysis compared multiple instances of connected vehicle data with high speed pavement profile vehicle (Class 1 profiler) data. A separate analysis

Risk-based transportation asset management program (TAMP) gives transportation agencies the ability to have a mechanism for documenting and measuring risks to their operations, as this will help drive the potential mitigation activities. The monitoring and updating of the risk management process is essential to TAMP as it will ensure that the financial plan and investment strategy components of the

Accessibility, the number of time-decayed jobs available to each zone within a region, can help prioritize candidate transportation investments. This paper demonstrates how to compute auto accessibility using commonly available resources and identifies strategies needed to render calculations feasible and transparent. (The scope excludes transit and pedestrian impacts.) For the first objective, computational

AASHTO’s ad hoc method (AAM) for predicting free-field soil stress under a rectangular loading area is a simple and very useful tool for the analysis of buried culverts subject to vehicular wheel loads. AAM assumes the surface load spreads with soil depth into an ever-increasing rectangular area whose dimensions are controlled by a constant spread angle θ usually taken as 30°, denoted as AAM-30°. Both

Traffic-related air pollution has been associated with adverse cardiovascular health effects in near-road residents. Transportation parameters are important surrogate variables to determine spatial variation of air pollution and consequential health outcomes. We used land-use regression models to explore associations between cardiovascular (metabolic syndrome [MetS]) health outcomes collected from

Capital improvement projects have the potential to enhance safety, mobility, and environmental quality, but these projects can include considerable costs. When making investment decisions, it is important for agencies to understand the costs in relation to the potential benefits. For several years, transportation agencies have analyzed and quantified the operational and environmental impacts of proposed

Long-life flexible pavements are well documented and used widely across the U.S. Found in every climate zone and traffic classification, long-life pavements do not experience deep structural distresses such as bottom-up fatigue cracking or substructure rutting. Full-scale test sections, built in 2003 at the National Center for Asphalt Technology (NCAT) Test Track, provided the basis for an optimized

The use of raw sugarcane bagasse ash (SCBA) as sand replacement in the production of engineered cementitious composites (ECCs) can improve its cost-effectiveness and practicality. A recent study by the authors showed that the use of raw SCBA as a replacement to sand in ECC mixtures substantially enhances the tensile ductility and provides mild improvements in tensile strength; however, it also indicated

This study presents a new mechanistic procedure for determining the critical cracking temperature of asphalt concrete (AC) using data from bending beam rheometer (BBR) test of asphalt binder and indirect tension (IDT) test of AC. This new procedure uses BBR creep data to generate the mixture relaxation modulus mastercurve by utilizing the Hirsch model, time-temperature superposition principle, and

Speed estimation for the out-of-control truck on a downhill grade is essential for passive safety features like truck escape ramps to promote traffic safety. This paper presents a method for estimating the speed of out-of-control trucks based on Newton’s Laws of Motion. First of all, we analyze gravity effort, aerodynamics, and rolling resistance through a free body diagram of an out-of-control truck

Adaptive signal control technology (ASCT) is a traffic management strategy that optimizes signal timing based on real-time traffic demand. Although the primary intent of ASCT is to improve the operational performance of signalized intersections, the technology may also have substantial safety benefits. This study explored the potential safety benefits of the ASCT strategy deployed at signalized intersections

Transit signal priority (TSP) is a strategy that prioritizes the movement of transit vehicles through a signalized intersection to provide better transit travel time reliability and minimize transit delay. Although TSP is primarily intended to improve the operational performance of transit vehicles, it may also have substantial safety benefits. This study explored the potential safety benefits of the