Engineering Commons^™

The Legacy Of Car-Share And Light-Rail Transit For Mobility And Accessibility Improvements In Economically Marginalized Neighborhoods In The New York Metro Area, Kyeongsu Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the value of the car-share program and a new light rail system with respect to their impact on mobility and accessibility improvements in economically and transportation access-wise marginalized neighborhoods in NYC and its adjacent communities. It consists of three main essays that took deep dives into how each new service or system altered mobility or accessibility for those in need. The first essay (Chapter 2) investigates car-share vehicle utilization rates of the Zipcar across NYC. It assesses the utilization rates by vehicle type, service location, time period, and weekday usage compared to weekend activity. With a multivariate …

Analyzing Freight Congestion And Transportation Performance Measures Using The National Performance Management Research Data Set (Npmrds), Yaxin Zhang

Dissertations and Theses

Traffic congestion is common in urban areas. It results in loss of productivity, increased risk of passenger safety, increased fuel consumption, environment pollution, etc. Improving performance measurement is a tool to improve traffic flow and capacity planning.

The main data source in this research is the National Performance Management Research Data Set (NPMRDS) for 2018. NPMRDS is a form of commercial GPS probe data, obtained from vehicles with on-board probe technologies. This dataset is licensed by the Federal Highway Administration and is made available to State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) for the purpose of federally …

Structural Robustness Of Long-Span Cable-Supported Bridges, Qian Chen

Dissertations and Theses

As a critical part of the current infrastructure system, long-span bridges are directly exposed to adverse environments, such as floods, scours, hurricanes, etc., and dynamic loads such as earthquakes and vehicular impacts. Additionally, recent long-span cable-supported collapse examples show that many bridges suffered progressive collapse when local damage occurred, and they are highly vulnerable to severe damages in the event of a localized failure. However, the traditional design approaches are unable to provide explicit measures of residual safety of bridges, especially after an abnormal event. Currently available redundancy and robustness evaluation approaches, which were developed mainly for short-span bridges, are …

Understanding The Effect Of Climate And Hydrometeorological Extremes On Natural And Human-Induced Hydrosystems, Jeongwoo Hwang

Dissertations and Theses

The contemporary hydrosystems of the United States involve a complex combination of natural and modified basins in the presence of changing climate and anthropogenic impacts. An enhanced understanding of the interdependence between climate forcings, human-induced interventions, and water balance in both natural and modified basins are essential for developing reliable and resilient hydrosystems and for better water resources management. In response, this dissertation focuses on investigating the hydroclimatology of natural and modified basins across the contiguous United States. It has three research objectives: (1) to explain flow alterations due to anthropogenic activities, especially dam operations, in modified basins and understand …

Alternate Load Paths And Retrofits For Long-Span Truss Bridges Under Sudden Member Loss And Blast Loads, Huihui Li

Dissertations and Theses

In current bridge design practices, due to the existence of alternate load paths (ALPs), continued stability and progressive collapse-resistance of long-span bridges following the initialed loss of a critical member can be attributed to “redundancy”. However, “redundancy”, also indicated as the post member failure behavior of long-span bridges is not well understood and is not explicitly considered, especially for long-span truss bridges. As one of the most famous collapse events that took place recently, collapse of the I-35W truss bridge has demonstrated the vulnerabilities of long-span truss bridges, and their societal and economic consequences under the abnormal events, such as …