Finance and Financial Management Commons^™

Impact Of Life-Cycle Costs Threshold Criteria In The Alternate Design Pavement Bidding Practices Of Public Transportation Agencies, Ilker Karaca, Douglas Gransberg, Ashley F. Buss

Ilker Karaca

This paper proposes a model that enables Department of Transportation (DOT) policy makers to quantify the expected volume of projects that will qualify for letting in their alternate design/alternate bid (ADAB) pavement bidding programs. Current guidance on alternate bidding recommends a fixed percentage as the life cycle cost (LCC) threshold criterion to determine whether pavement selection decisions should be made through ADAB bidding practices. The paper’s analysis shows that the fixed LCC threshold percentage approach may have considerable shortcomings. Instead, a dynamic threshold value is proposed that can subsequently be calibrated by agencies, based on the desired size of their …

Transportation Safety Performance Of Us Bus Transit Agencies And Population Density: A Cross-Sectional Analysis (2008-2014), Ilker Karaca, Peter T. Savolainen

Ilker Karaca

The paper examines the transportation safety performance of transit agencies providing public bus service in the US by using data from the National Transit Database (NTD)

Uses NTD data for a seven-year period from 2008 to 2014 • 3,853 observations for 651 public transportation agencies in 50 states

Seven types of bus transit fatalities and injuries (including passengers, operators, pedestrians, bicyclists)

Main explanatory variable: urban density obtained from the US Census figures

Other explanatory variables: total agency revenue miles, unlinked passenger trips, agency fleet size, and urban population

Nchrp Synthesis 499: Alternate Design/Alternate Bid Process For Pavement-Type Selection. A Synthesis Of Highway Practice, Douglas D. Gransberg, Ashley F. Buss, Ilker Karaca, Michael C. Loulakis

Ilker Karaca

Highway administrators, engineers, and researchers often face problems for which information already exists, either in documented form or as undocumented experience and practice. This information may be fragmented, scattered, and unevaluated. As a consequence, full knowledge of what has been learned about a problem may not be brought to bear on its solution. Costly research findings may go unused, valuable experience may be overlooked, and due consideration may not be given to recommended practices for solving or alleviating the problem. There is information on nearly every subject of concern to highway administrators and engineers. Much of it derives from research …

Top-Down Construction Cost Estimating Model Using An Artificial Neural Network, Douglas D. Gransberg, H. David Jeong, Ilker Karaca, Brendon Gardner

Ilker Karaca

This report contains the information and background on top-down cost estimating using artificial neural networks (ANN)_to enhance the accuracy of MDT early estimates of construction costs. Upon conducting an extensive review of MDT’s budgeting and cost estimating efforts, and following a survey of agency experts on the identification of the most salient project attributes with the dual-objectives of low effort and high accuracy, a rational method for top-down variable selection is proposed. Selected variables were further tested in their explanatory power of construction costs through the application of two cost estimating methodologies—multiple regression and artificial neural network methodologies. Both methods …