Engineering Commons^™

Impact Of Augmented Documentation Workflows On Transportation Agency Asphalt Paving Operations: A Qualitative And Quantitative Study, Josh Withrow

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

e-Ticketing was an intriguing technology to many state transportation agencies (STAs) pre-COVID-19 pandemic but gained significant attention upon arrival of the pandemic due to the contactless nature of the technology. Research completed prior to the pandemic into e-ticketing for asphalt paving primarily identified qualitative benefits and concerns. However, minimal academic literature exists in the post-pandemic era discussing the additional e-ticketing benefits not previously captured which resulted in increased implementation by STAs. This research seeks to address this gap by gathering information from state members of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Committee on Construction (AASHTO COC), employees …

Geophysical Method Used For The Determination And Prediction Of Soil Strength And Stiffness Parameters, Dabo Adama

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

This paper presents the results of an effort to use geophysical measurements such as seismic wave velocities and electrical resistivities to calculate airfield design parameters. The study converts all geophysical measurements to equivalent California Bearing Ratio (CBR) values, comparing CBR values estimated from DCP penetration resistance with CBR values estimated from shear wave velocity and electrical resistivity values. Relationships linking the geophysical measurements to CBR estimates were established using laboratory data and applied to field in-situ measurements. The elastic modulus (E) is the stiffness parameter involved in predicting soil strength and stiffness. This research aims to relate electrical conductivity and …

Do Transportation Network Companies Affect Road Safety Outcomes: A Spatially Detailed Analysis In San Francisco, Vedant Shriniwas Goyal

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

US traffic fatal deaths have steadily risen since 2010, with the past few years witnessing an unusual trend increase. To reverse such a dangerous trend, one must understand how and why road crashes occur and which factors are causing them. Emerging transportation technologies have shown the potential to improve mobility and safety. However, such technologies are not inherently beneficial and could worsen road safety if not effectively implemented. One such transportation technology that warrants investigation is the rise of ridesharing services, also called Transportation Network Companies (TNCs). The primary goal of the dissertation is to explore the statistical relationship between …

Clustering States To Improve The Strategic Highway Safety Plan, Victoria Cambron

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Each update to a Strategic Highway Safety Plan (SHSP) can require a large amount of time, resources, and funding. From the requirements in U.S.C.148(a)(13)(E-F), in the SHSP update process states must consider the results of other transportation planning processes and develop a list of strategies to reduce or eliminate fatal and serious injury crashes (United States, 2023). To fulfill these requirements more efficiently and to gain the largest amount of benefit from said research, this thesis asks the question: how do we select other state transportation plans to study for ideas on improving our own SHSP? In this thesis, a …

Rollout Of A Digital Comprehensive Safety Management System In A Large Public Agency: A Case Study With Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Salena Pham

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

It’s understood that construction is extremely dangerous and highway construction has an added risk that comes from the presence of traffic. Many steps and prevention measures can be taken to reduce the risks to workers’ safety in highway work zones. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) realized they had room for improvement and wanted to have a database that would allow for analysis of the common causes of incidents. The new software KYTC wanted to implement is called Origami Risk. Origami Risk is a cloud-based safety management system (SMS) software that offers a huge range of customizable risk management, RMIS, environmental health …

Estimating The Effectiveness Of Incentives On The Adoption Of Electric Vehicles, Michelle O. Imarah

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

This study aims to estimate the effectiveness of incentives in increasing the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) among households in the near future. Five scenarios were tested using a vehicle type choice model estimated from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data: (1) increasing the number of EV chargers, (2) reducing the purchase price of EVs based on household income, (3) increasing the number of EV models and makes, (4) increasing the EV range, and (5) all scenarios at once. Results showed that all the scenarios were effective in increasing EV adoption amongst households. Some scenarios were more effective …

Accuracy And Uncertainty In Traffic And Transit Ridership Forecasts, Jawad Mahmud Hoque

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Investments of public dollars on highway and transit infrastructure are influenced by the anticipated demands for highways and public transportations or traffic and transit ridership forecasts. The purpose of this study is to understand the accuracy of road traffic forecasts and transit ridership forecasts, to identify the factors that affect their accuracy, and to develop a method to estimate the uncertainty inherent in those forecasts. In addition, this research investigates the pre-pandemic decline in transit ridership across the US metro areas since 2012 and its influence on the accuracy of transit forecasts.

The sample of 1,291 road projects from the …

Identifying And Evaluating The Perceptions Of Near-Miss Reporting Within The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Seth Atkins

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

In the field of construction, most safety data and practices focus on preventing and mitigating serious incidents resulting in injuries or fatalities. However, on construction sites, near-miss events occur more frequently than said serious incidents and, under marginally different conditions, could potentially lead to damages, injuries, or fatalities. Therefore, near-miss reporting can serve as a useful tool for managing safety as it allows for workers to identify and managers to address potential risk factors within construction sites. While most construction companies have implemented some method for reporting near-miss events, many organizations, such as the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC), struggle with …

Optimizing The Potential Of Highway Safety Investment, Riana Tanzen

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Highway safety management aims to prevent crashes and reduce the resulting frequency and severity within the limit of available resources. The identification of potentially hazardous sites and investment on safety treatments have been fundamental to fulfill this goal. However, having many highway safety improvement projects in hand, safety professionals need to evaluate several different alternatives and allocate the limited funds to the ones that would provide the highest return on investment. Hence, prioritizing the safety projects based on their potential to achieve the greatest safety benefit is crucial. Ineffective prioritization can distribute funds to locations with less potential for improvement …

Evaluation Of Scoring Methods For Prioritizing Pedestrian And Bicycle Projects, Daria Korostina

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

To increase the number of pedestrian and bicycle facilities and to grow the number of people using those facilities in Kentucky more such projects need to be implemented. The Strategic Highway Investment Formula for Tomorrow (SHIFT) is a data-driven approach that Kentucky uses for prioritizing projects in the state, but its focus is auto-centric. The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate a prioritization scoring approach for pedestrian and bicycle projects that could be implemented into SHIFT. The study used the SHIFT–2022 pedestrian and bicycle projects to develop and evaluate different scoring scenarios. After scoring each project on …

Protocols And Architecture For Privacy-Preserving Authentication And Secure Message Dissemination In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Shafika Showkat Moni

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

The rapid development in the automotive industry and wireless communication technologies have enhanced the popularity of Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Today, the automobile industry is developing sophisticated sensors that can provide a wide range of assistive features, including accident avoidance, automatic lane tracking, semi-autonomous driving, suggested lane changes, and more. VANETs can provide drivers a safer and more comfortable driving experience, as well as many other useful services by leveraging such technological advancements. Even though this networking technology enables smart and autonomous driving, it also introduces a plethora of attack vectors. However, the main issues to be sorted out …

Incorporating Speed Into Crash Modeling For Rural Two-Lane Highways, Fahmida Rahman

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Rural two-lane highways account for 76% in mileages of the total paved roads in the US. In Kentucky, these roads represent 85 % of the state-maintained mileages. Crashes on these roads account for 40% of all crashes, 47% of injury crashes, and 66% of fatal crashes on state-maintained roads. These statistics draw attention to the need to investigate the crashes on these roads. Several factors such as road geometries, traffic volume, human behavior, etc. contribute to crashes on a road. Recently, studies have identified speed as one of the key factors of crashes as well as the severity associated with …

Load And Pressure Distribution As A Function Of Dynamic Contact Stress At The Railroad Crosstie-Ballast Interface, Habib Abdil Unluoglu

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Excessive crosstie wear and abrasion and ballast wear and fouling are two of the fundamental problems contributing to inadequate railroad track performance. This adversely affects the attainment and long-term maintenance of desired track geometric requirements. The magnitudes and distribution of the stresses at the crosstie-ballast (CT-B) interface must be known to determine the stress distribution on the ballast. However, the stresses at the top of the ballast often vary significantly. This study examines a new approach to predicting dynamic contact pressures at the interface of crosstie and ballast using the ‘square wave theory.’ A data set of in-track CT-B interfacial …

Induced Travel Demand: Measuring The Contribution Of Additional Lane Miles On The Increase In U.S. Vehicle Miles Traveled From 1980 To 2019, Brandon Ivanchak

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Induced travel demand is the effect of increasing the amount of vehicle miles traveled because of an increase in roadway capacity. It is explained by the idea that increasing capacity makes driving on those roads more desirable, thereby causing more people to use them. In1962, Robert Downs postulated that “On urban commuter expressways, peak hour traffic congestion rises to meet maximum capacity,” referring to this as the law of peak hour traffic congestion. Since then, there have been ongoing debates about the effectiveness and environmental impact of roadway expansion projects, and efforts to quantify induced demand to inform those debates. …

Assessing Freeway Crash Risk Using Crowdsourced Waze Incident Alerts, Eugene Boasiako Antwi

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Traffic data obtained through crowdsourcing are becoming more accessible to traffic agencies due to advancements in smartphone technology. Traffic managers aim to use this data to complement their conventional sources of data and provide additional context in their analysis. In this study, Waze incident alerts are integrated with GPS-Probe speed data and Kentucky State Police (KSP) crashes to assess their impact on traffic flow and safety on freeways in Kentucky. The analysis showed that the presence of a vehicle on the shoulder is associated with about 36.7% of freeway crashes in Kentucky. The presence of a vehicle on the shoulder …

Evaluation Of Liquid Ice Melting Additives For Winter Maintenance Applications, Erin Lammers-Staats

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Winter weather can often pose difficulties for transportation agencies as they work to clear roads of snow and ice quickly so that motorists can travel safely and efficiently. Kentucky has made efforts to maximize efficiency within its winter maintenance program by focusing on optimized equipment usage and personnel time management. This study’s objective was to evaluate novel anti-icers and calculate how their performance compared to the current performance of brine and calcium chloride mixture. New brine additives claim to offer better results, but there is very little guidance about how to systematically evaluate new anti-icers. The author developed a testing …

Context Classification Of Roadways Using Nationally Available Gis Data, Laura Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

A Context Classification System based on context attributes of the area surrounding a roadway provides detailed information about the environment of a roadway corridor, while enabling practitioners to cater roadway projects to the community they are within. This study sought to create a system that would automatically classify roadway segments into the correct context, using data sources that are available nationwide. The proposed approach was tested by classifying the roadways in Highway District 7 of the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. This process would make context classification approachable to more organizations, as it would reduce the amount of time required to apply …

Estimating Free-Flow Speed With Lidar And Overhead Imagery, Armin Hadzic

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Understanding free-flow speed is fundamental to transportation engineering in order to improve traffic flow, control, and planning. The free-flow speed of a road segment is the average speed of automobiles unaffected by traffic congestion or delay. Collecting speed data across a state is both expensive and time consuming. Some approaches have been presented to estimate speed using geometric road features for certain types of roads in limited environments. However, estimating speed at state scale for varying landscapes, environments, and road qualities has been relegated to manual engineering and expensive sensor networks. This thesis proposes an automated approach for estimating free-flow …

Effect Of Socioeconomic And Demographic Factors Of Driver Residence On Crash Occurrence, Shraddha Sagar

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

In the U.S., road traffic crashes are a leading cause of death. Crash data from the state of Kentucky shows that the per capita crash rates and crash-related fatalities were higher than the national average for over a decade. In effort to explain why the U.S. Southeast experiences higher crash rates than other regions of the country, previous research has argued the region’s unique socioeconomic provide a compelling explanation. Taking this observation as a starting point, this study examines the relationship between highway safety and socioeconomic characteristics using an extensive crash dataset from Kentucky.

The primary goal of this research …

The Relationship Between Roadway Homogeneity And Network Coverage For Network Screening, Riana Tanzen

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

In the context of transportation safety engineering, network screening is a method of identifying and prioritizing high-risk locations for potential safety investment. Since its release, the Highway Safety Manual (HSM) has facilitated the adoption of Safety Performance Functions (SPF) to predict the number of crashes for the network screening of any facility type. The predictive model becomes more reliable when developed from crash data with homogeneous roadway segments and this homogeneity can be attained by applying specific geometric attributes to the dataset. The caveat to this method is the requirement of adjustment factors (AFs) to adjust the predicted estimate for …

Design And Analysis Of A Pavement Marker Detection System, Timothy L. Johnson Ii

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Personal injuries and property damage due to the failure of snow-plowable pavement markers which detach from pavement surfaces has led to the development of new all-plastic pavement markers which are located entirely below the planar surface of the pavement. The new all-plastic design pushes existing solutions used to avoid striping over highway reflectors into obsolescence since current solutions operate using electromagnets to sense the metal housings of snow-plowable pavement markers. A replacement solution is currently sought by the highway maintenance industry and three different marker detection methods were developed and tested on real-world highways with both new and aging pavement …

Effect Of Temporal Instability Of Factors Contributing To Single-Vehicle Crash Severity--A Mixed Logit Approach, A. M. Hasibul Islam

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

This study investigates the factors associated with single-vehicle crash injury severity using five years (2014 – 2018) of crash data from Kentucky, USA, using a mixed (random-parameter) logit model. We also explore the temporal heterogeneity of the correlated factors across different times of the day. Most crash-severity models assume that the estimated parameters remain temporally stable. For instance, the effect of light conditions on crash severity may differ based on the time of the crash occurrence—noon vs. dusk. The temporal instability of the factors due to the time-of-day variation can lead to (under) overestimating the parameters that influence the development …

Adapting Crash Modification Factors For The Connected And Autonomous Vehicle Environment, Federico Valentin Lause Iii

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

The Crash Modification Factor (CMF) clearinghouse can be used to estimate benefits for specific highway safety countermeasures. It assists safety professionals in the allocation of investments. The clearinghouse contains over 7000 entries of which only 446 are categorized as intelligent transportation systems or advanced technology, but none directly address connected or autonomous vehicles (CAVs). Further, the effectiveness of highway safety countermeasures is assumed to remain constant over time, an assumption that is particularly problematic as new technologies are introduced. For example, for the existing fleet of human-driven vehicles, installation of rumble strip can potentially reduce “run-off-road” crashes by 40%. If …

Connected And Autonomous Vehicles Effects On Emergency Response Times, Austin William Obenauf

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Emergency response times have been shown to be directly correlated with mortality rates of out-of-hospital patients. Studies have been conducted to show the relationship between time and mortality rates until patients receive the proper treatment. With more cardiac arrests and other life threatening illnesses occurring in the United States, more emergency calls will be required as well. As of today, technological advancements have been made to reduce response times, but human factors still require certain procedures, causing delays in the run time and increasing the rate of mortality. Here we show the results of emergency response times with the market …

Redefining Construction “As-Built” Plans To Meet Current Kentucky Transportation Cabinet Needs, Victoria Lynn Lasley

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

As-built drawings are the traditional method used by the construction industry to record changes made during construction. As-builts provide valuable information for new design projects as well as rehabilitation and remediation projects. The completeness and accuracy of these plans are essential for transportation industries and their success. While the importance of as-builts is widely recognized, the process of creating them has proven to be difficult. It is a time consuming process and entities often lack the resources necessary to complete accurate and detailed as-builts. After an investigation of current as-built operations within State Transportation Agencies, recommendations have been made to …

Evaluate Probe Speed Data Quality To Improve Transportation Modeling, Fahmida Rahman

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Probe speed data are widely used to calculate performance measures for quantifying state-wide traffic conditions. Estimation of the accurate performance measures requires adequate speed data observations. However, probe vehicles reporting the speed data may not be available all the time on each road segment. Agencies need to develop a good understanding of the adequacy of these reported data before using them in different transportation applications. This study attempts to systematically assess the quality of the probe data by proposing a method, which determines the minimum sample rate for checking data adequacy. The minimum sample rate is defined as the minimum …

Quantifying The Impact Of Transportation Network Companies (Tncs) On Traffic Congestion In San Francisco, Sneha Roy

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

This research investigates whether Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), such as Uber and Lyft, live up to their stated vision of reducing congestion by complementing transit and reducing car ownership in major cities. The objective of this research study is to answer the question: are TNCs are correlated to traffic congestion in the city of San Francisco? If found to be so, do they increase or decrease traffic congestion for the case of San Francisco? If and how TNC pickups and drop-offs impact traffic congestion within San Francisco? And finally, how does the magnitude of this measured command of TNCs on …

The Use Of 3-D Highway Differential Geometry In Crash Prediction Modeling, Kiriakos Amiridis

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

The objective of this research is to evaluate and introduce a new methodology regarding rural highway safety. Current practices rely on crash prediction models that utilize specific explanatory variables, whereas the depository of knowledge for past research is the Highway Safety Manual (HSM). Most of the prediction models in the HSM identify the effect of individual geometric elements on crash occurrence and consider their combination in a multiplicative manner, where each effect is multiplied with others to determine their combined influence. The concepts of 3-dimesnional (3-D) representation of the roadway surface have also been explored in the past aiming to …

Improving Bicycle Infrastructure With The Use Of Bicycle Share Travel Data, Jennifer Mintao Weast

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Bicycling as a mode of transportation has been increasing in recent years due to its environmental and health benefits. The availability of bicycles through bicycle share programs has made bicycling a more viable option. With this increase, there is a need for complementary improvements of bicycle infrastructure. Many local and regional transportation agencies are recognizing this need and developing a master plan or safety action plan to improve the city’s bicycle and walking facilities. This study examines bicycle travel demands and travel patterns in Lexington, Kentucky as generated by SPIN bicycle share users. It is hypothesized that the SPIN users …

An Assessment Of Historical Traffic Forecast Accuracy And Sources Of Forecast Error, Jawad Mahmud Hoque

Theses and Dissertations--Civil Engineering

Transportation infrastructure improvement projects are typically huge and have significant economic and environmental effects. Forecasts of demand of the facility in the form of traffic level help size the project as well as choose between several alternatives. Inaccuracy in these forecasts can thus have a great impact on the efficiency of the operational design and the benefits accrued from the project against the cost. Despite this understanding, evaluation of traffic forecast inaccuracy has been too few, especially for un-tolled roads in the United States. This study, part of a National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) funded project, bridges this gap …