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.

In a congested urban street network the average traffic speed is an inadequate metric for measuring speed changes that drivers can perceive from changes in traffic control strategies.

A driver – oriented metric is needed. Stop frequency distributions were developed for avenue segments in Manhattan, NYC, from known vehicle travel times for the am, midday, and pm peak hours.

This report examines the policies and strategies governing the design and, especially, operations of bus lanes in major congested urban centers. It focuses on bus lanes that operate in mixed traffic conditions; the study does not examine practices concerning bus priority lanes on urban highways or freeways. Four key questions addressed in the paper are:

The removal of paint from bridges and other structures is a significant issue facing transportation agencies because of the presence and potential for release of lead and other contaminants upon disposal. A large percentage of the bridges are reaching a critical level of deterioration, resulting in management issues for paint waste. The New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) applies a conservative approach by assuming all waste generated from bridges previously painted with lead-based paint (LBP) is hazardous.

Creating transportation infrastructure, which can clean up itself and contaminated air surrounding it, can be a groundbreaking approach in addressing environmental challenges of our time. This project has explored a possibility of depositing coatings on the existing materials to address a feasibility of this approach. More specifically, we have quantified the rates of removal of pollutants from the air by a new generation of coatings, which can be applied on any architectural elements and transportation infrastructure.

New York Harbor was directly in the path of the most damaging part of Hurricane Sandy causing significant impact on many of the facilities of the Port of New York and New Jersey. The U.S. Coast Guard closed the entire Port to all traffic before the storm hit on October 28th. It was not fully reopened to vessel traffic until November 4th. Then, even though the waterways were open, numerous port terminals and maritime facilities did not resume their operations for several more weeks because of power failures and damages to the facilities and equipment.

In this research, we present the results of a behavior model to capture different routing strategies executed by evacuees during hurricane evacuation by using a random‐parameter logit‐based modeling approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to model evacuees’ strategic behavior for evacuation routing decisions using a random‐parameter model. A probabilistic model incorporating the demographic characteristics of evacuees and evacuation related characteristics would predict the routing behavior of evacuees’ in a better way.

Detecting corrosion in the tendons of post-tensioned (PT) concrete structures is technically challenging. The general inaccessibility of the tendons makes evaluation difficult, costly and often inconclusive. This study had two objectives. The first objective was to design, implement and validate the use of an innovative monitoring system based on embedded arrays of low profile piezoelectric transducers to generate and receive guided ultrasonic waves (GUW) over the length of a pre-stressing tendon.

The paper compares the fatigue life of neat and modified PAV-aged binders and mastics and determines the influence of dust on fatigue life using the Linear Amplitude Sweep (LAS) method. It will also compare these results with results from the DER and 50% Drop Methods as reported in previous research. The binders used were PG 58-28, PG 64-22, PG 70-22, PG 76-28 and PG 82- 22. The dust content for the mastic binder was 0%, 5%, and 15% dust to binder by mass.