A cost-effective bridge is a bridge whose maintenance is based on its chemical condition over it's entire service life.  If deterioration mechanisms are prevented, a bridge would cost considerably less to maintain and safely serves its full design service life, if not longer.  The current practice for physical evaluation and delayed maintenance of deteriorated concrete bridges is fundamentally wrong.  The current inspection manuals are primarily focused on detecting physical damage in concrete bridge elements.

Freight flows are a physical expression of the economy, so fostering efficiency in the movement of freight from producers to consumers will spur growth for the economy and employment. However, the transportation of freight generates a large amount of traffic, with resultant congestion, pollution, noise, infrastructure damage, and threats to the quality of life.

Introduction. Recent demographic trends suggest an increasing suburbanization of poor populations. Given that poor households are often unable to afford increasing housing prices in many urban areas they are increasingly moving to the suburbs. At the same time, suburbs often do not support the public transit needs of poor populations and access to jobs. Insufficient transit can also exacerbate recovery times after extreme weather events for vulnerable populations.

Concrete is one of the most commonly used construction materials for building nation’s infrastructure such as roadways, bridges, tunnels, and buildings, with a per-capita consumption of more than two tons. The most energy consuming and expensive component of concrete is Portland cement, which accounts for more than 70% of the raw material cost towards producing concrete. One metric ton of Portland cement production consumes about 5,792,000 BTU of energy.

The objectives of this research are 1) to measure negative and positive estimates of Panama Canal expansion using secondary imports and exports data available from WISERTrade (www.wisertrade.org) and 2) to understand the possible gains that New York and New Jersey states obtain. To increase container shipment capacity, the Panama Canal Authority in 2006 decided to invest more than $5 billion to expand the Canal. The expanded Canal will accommodate larger vessels that cannot now traverse the facility.

This study investigates the uses of public-private partnerships (P3’s) to finance infrastructure improvements for passenger trains running at “high speed.” It answers the following questions: is P3 financing best suited to construction of very high speed (vhs) rail projects or can it also be applied to projects that achieve “higher,” but not “very high” speed? If best suited to vhs development, why? If more broadly applicable, what precedents exist for applying P3 finance to less than vhs rail projects and in what specific circumstances?

Anonymous probe vehicle data are currently being collected on major interstates and arterials throughout the United States. Probe data are used to assign average speeds to pre-define roadway segments of varying lengths. These segments are known as Traffic Message Channels (TMCs).Through the analysis of this probe data for each TMC, transportation agencies have been making progress in the development of agency wide performance measures to better plan and manage spatially distributed infrastructure assets (1, 2).

In 2012, there were 139 incidents in which people got hit by subway trains in New York City, compared with 146 in 2011. Most of the victims slipped or fell or went on to the tracks to fetch personal belongs. A promising approach to reduce future occurrence of such tragedies is distributed sensor nodes that detect obstacles and monitor train motion [1]. In such applications, an important limitation is the near impossible task of maintaining numerous sensors and microsystems.

Activity-based travel demand models, which have their theoretical foundation explicitly rooted in the accepted notion that travel is derived from daily activities, offer an attractive, but complex, alternative to the conventional four-step forecasting models. Recent implementations of such approaches via microsimulations have shown promise for practical application of this theoretical construct. I propose a one-year study that develops a framework of an activity-travel microsimulator based on the Household Activity Pattern Problem (HAPP).

In recent years, there is growing interest in promoting the smart growth concept that aims at revitalizing land use and transportation patterns to avoid “sprawl” and to reduce negative externalities of transportation systems. The fundamental idea behind such a concept is to revitalize land use and transportation patterns to avoid “sprawl” and to replace it by safe, livable, sustainable, environmentally-sound, and green-mode-oriented communities.