New York City and the surrounding counties of the metro region has arguably the most extensive and complex transportation system in the United States. This region has almost every type of transport system and mode of travel, with massive passenger and freight movement across and into the region. Further, this region continues to grow and change while retaining a core base of infrastructure and economic activity that is based on historical development patterns and land use.

In the thirty-two years since the NYMTC forum was established, technology has advanced in staggering bounds. Research seems to be no longer limited to breadth and depth - our ability to provided meaningful evidence based answers to the most basic questions about our constantly moving society is greater than it has ever been. New methods of data collection and analysis are transforming our ability to examine our travel decisions and provide researchers with new vectors for analytic investigation.

Structural Analysis of Traffic Signal Poles is a time-consuming and necessary process for engineers at the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT). This process is currently done manually and is inefficient.

It is a benefit to the State of New York if this structural analysis could be performed by a standardized computer program to determine if a proposed load configuration can be supported by existing or new structure(s).

Public transit agencies often struggle with service reliability issues; when a train or bus does not arrive on time, passengers become frustrated and may be less likely to choose transit for future trips. To address reliability issues, transit authorities increasingly provide real-time information (RTI) to riders via countdown clocks in stations and passengers’ mobile devices. Though these new information technologies are now available in many transit systems throughout the country, their impact on overall transit ridership - particularly train ridership - remains unclear.

The Strategic Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Deployment Plan for New York City was last updated in 2005 by Polytechnic University of New York. The New York City region has invested significant resources on ITS deployment in the past decades. It has involved the deployment of an advanced controller (the ASTC), a wireless communication infrastructure (NYCWiN), detectors, and the overall data management system to process information and to communicate the control settings.

The defined scope of this Task is the development of a Guide to be used in-house by NYCDOT traffic engineers documenting all the necessary steps in requesting and approving traffic signals, with a focus on traffic signal control principles, practices, and technologies. The research team proposes to produce such a guide in the first year of a multi-year undertaking now being proposed, and to focus later phases on modernizing the basic principles that underlie such a Guide. The later phases will be defined in conjunction with NYCDOT during the first year.

NYCDOT along with many other DOTs in the region and around the country have been using probe vehicle data for monitoring time-dependent traffic conditions and conducting before and after studies of various transportation projects. Specifically, NYCDOT has been using probe vehicle data from yellow taxis and other vehicles equipped with GPS and TRNSMIT system. In this project NYCDOT wants to automate and enhance their use of MTA bus data that they are already acquiring under a protocol developed between the two agencies.

This research project builds on the work and goals of the New York City Department of Transportation NYCDOT) in its long standing efforts to promote the safety of pedestrians, as described in the Vision Zero Initiative and the NYCDOT’s 2016 Strategic Plan. As part of the Vision Zero Initiative, in 2015, NYCDOT installed over 400 Leading Pedestrian Intervals, and completed 60 safety projects in Vision Zero Priority Locations.

The purpose of this guide is to provide some elementary guidance to beginning traffic engineers in the NYCDOT Signal Timing Division on the standards of signal timing in NYC. The guide is intended to provide an understanding of the influence of traffic signal design on traffic operations, and is a primer on traffic signal timing, phasing, and coordination.

Polymer modified binders are now extensively used in the asphalt industry. However, it is still not well understood how the polymers and the base binders interlock and whether the degree of interlocking impacts performance of polymer modified binders. The research has shown that low non-recoverable compliance values in the Multiple Stress Creep and Recovery test at 64 C appear to show significantly low rutting performance in the laboratory based on the flow time test.