Over the past few decades, urbanization and economic growth have intensified the need for more efficient urban and regional transportation, including the expansion and reorganization of existing transportation networks. Given such huge investments and severe constraints on resources such as financial and land, infrastructure projects require a careful prioritization and selection among available alternatives. In reality, project selection appears to be determined as much by politics as by transport-economic considerations.

This study represents the state of good practice economic theory and models and concludes that there is, indeed value to non-strike agreements in construction projects. Certainly, every major construction project – especially public projects that must go through rigorous Benefit Cost Analyses to gain funding – has an intrinsic value to its owner. However, as is well documented in construction work, all projects have elements of risk. In fact the levels of risk are included in both the owner’s budget and in the contractor’s estimate.

An efficient electromagnetic energy harvester featured with mechanical motion rectifier (MMR) is designed to recover energy from the vibration-like railroad track deflections induced by passing trains. Comparing to typical existing vibration energy harvester technologies can only harvest sub-watts or milliwatts power applications, the proposed harvester is designed to power major track-side accessories and possibly make railroad independent from national grid.

Functional obsolescence and structural deficiencies of highway bridges are posing significant threats to commuters and transportation agencies throughout the United States. Recently, New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) classified approximately one quarter of its bridges as functionally obsolete and one-eighth as structurally deficient. Highway bridges located in urban areas are especially at high risk of functional obsolescence as the aging highway systems in these areas face significant increases in traffic volumes.

There has long been interest in estimating origin-destination (O-D) matrices from link count (or other) data. For the most part, previous efforts have focused on creating O-D tables for passenger movements by automobile, using a single vehicle class. This report describes a formulation of the multiclass O-D estimation problem that is constructed to accept a variety of different types of data that relate O-D volumes to observed values.

The objective of this paper is to examine whether new firms are more likely to form near rail transit stations. Two relatively new light-rail systems, one in Portland, Oregon and the other in Dallas, Texas form the basis of the analysis. A geo-coded time-series database of firm births from 1991 through 2008 is analyzed using all firm births, firm births of various sizes, and firm births of specific industry sectors. A random effects negative-binomial model is used to examine associations between proximity to rail stations and other spatially defined variables.

This project develops a method for predicting coastal flooding considering climate change and sea level rise, and its impact on population and transportation network. In particular, a modeling framework has been proposed to predict flooding and estimate affected population and traffic systems needed for evacuation plans, and the following tasks have been conducted:

Due to particulates common in crumb rubber-modified asphalt binders, conventional PG grading using the Dynamic Shear Rheometer (DSR) with a gap height of 1.0 mm may not be valid and in accordance with current specifications. Asphalt binder testing and mixture testing was conducted on binders with and without crumb rubber modification to determine an asphalt binder test method which best matches the mixture performance.

Nationwide traffic loads are increasing, pushing conventional asphalt to its limit. In New Jersey matters are made worse by the heavy use of the Northeast Corridor. Polymer modification of asphalt, which can improve both low and high performance, is already available; however, in many cases traditional Superpave testing is not sensitive enough to quantify the impact of modification, dimensioning its use. Elastic Recovery and Forced Ductility, Superpave Performance Grade Plus tests, are sensitive to polymer modification but are time intensive and costly.

This research aims to explore performance measures quantified based on different transportation data sources. It examined the major performance measures that can help describe both traffic operations and safety conditions. The available data sources that can be used to derive the performance measures were investigated. Particularly, performance measures related to travel time reliability, incident duration, and secondary crashes have been emphasized. Data-driven methodologies for performance quantification have been proposed for each category.