Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Density Of Demand And The Consumer Benefit From Uber, Matthew H. Shapiro

Research Collection School Of Economics

Uber has attracted the attention of economists and policy makers for its innovations in the taxicab market and its potential for significant consumer welfare gains. The size of this gain depends in part on whether these innovations permit transactions previously costly or infeasible. Using New York City — the largest taxi market in the country — as its context, this paper estimates the level of any technological advantage Uber has over hail taxis in matching to consumers. I combine publicly available transportation data with data scraped from Uber and traffic cameras to estimate a model of the demand for transportation …

Toward A Guide For Smart Mobility Corridors: Frameworks And Tools For Measuring, Understanding, And Realizing Transportation Land Use Coordination, Bruce Appleyard, Jonathan Stanton, Chris Allen

Mineta Transportation Institute

The coordination of transportation and land use (also known as “smart growth”) has been a long-standing goal for planning and engineering professionals, but to this day it remains an elusive concept to realize. Leaving us with this central question -- how can we best achieve transportation and land use coordination at the corridor level?

In response, this report provides a review of literature and practice related to sustainability, livability, and equity (SLE) with a focus on corridor-level planning. Using Caltrans’ Corridor Planning Process Guide and Smart Mobility Framework as guideposts, this report also reviews various principles, performance measures, and place …

The Impact Of The Covid-19 Recovery On California Transportation Revenue: A Scenario Analysis Through 2040, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Hannah King, Martin Wachs, Jeremy Marks

Mineta Transportation Institute

The COVID-19 public health emergency has affected every aspect of life in California, reducing social and economic activity. Less activity translates to less travel, and less travel leads to less revenue generated from taxes on motor fuels. As California emerges from the COVID-19 crisis and returns to more normal levels of activity, the state must plan transportation system operations and maintenance in the context of deep uncertainty regarding future revenue.

To help decision makers navigate that uncertainty, we used spreadsheet models to estimate the impacts of different economic recovery scenarios from the COVID-19 pandemic on state-generated transportation revenue. Because it …

A Two-Stage Parallel Network Dea Model For Analyzing The Operational Capability Of Container Terminals, Jaehun Park, Byung Kwon Lee, Joyce M. W. Low

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study proposes a systematical approach to evaluate the operational capability of container terminals and discusses the effect of resource usages on operational performances. Two inter-dependent processes (i.e. the loading-discharging (L&D) and the delivery-receiving (D&R) operational processes) with shared/non-shared resources and common/separate productions are examined and characterized as a two-stage parallel network. An evaluation model is developed upon the principles of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the operational capability of the terminals. Using the real-world dataset of 9 container terminals at Port of Busan, comparative performance results are obtained for 5 years spanning across 2014–2018. The proposed model demonstrates …

Investing In California’S Transportation Future: Public Opinion On Critical Needs, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Hilary Nixon, Cameron Simmons

Mineta Transportation Institute

In 2017, the State of California adopted landmark legislation to increase the funds available for transportation in the state: Senate Bill 1 (SB1), the Road Repair and Accountability Act of 2017. Through a combination of higher gas and diesel motor fuel taxes, SB1 raises revenue for four critical transportation needs in the state: road maintenance and rehabilitation, relief from congestion, improvements to trade corridors, and improving transit and rail services.

To help state leaders identify the most important projects and programs to fund within those four topical areas, we conducted an online survey that asked a sample of 3,574 adult …

Development Of A Statistical Model To Predict Materials’ Unit Prices For Future Maintenance And Rehabilitation In Highway Life Cycle Cost Analysis, Changmo Kim, Ghazan Khan, Brent Nguyen, Emily L. Hoang

Mineta Transportation Institute

The main objectives of this study are to investigate the trends in primary pavement materials’ unit price over time and to develop statistical models and guidelines for using predictive unit prices of pavement materials instead of uniform unit prices in life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) for future maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) projects. Various socio-economic data were collected for the past 20 years (1997–2018) in California, including oil price, population, government expenditure in transportation, vehicle registration, and other key variables, in order to identify factors affecting pavement materials’ unit price. Additionally, the unit price records of the popular pavement materials were …

A Secure Flexible And Tampering-Resistant Data Sharing System For Vehicular Social Networks, Jianfei Sun, Hu Xiong, Shufan Zhang, Ximeng Liu, Jiaming Yuan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Vehicular social networks (VSNs) have emerged as the promising paradigm of vehicular networks that can improve traffic safety, relieve traffic congestion and even provide comprehensive social services by sharing vehicular sensory data. To selectively share the sensory data with other vehicles in the vicinity and reduce the local storage burden of vehicles, the vehicular sensory data are usually outsourced to vehicle cloud server for sharing and searching. However, existing data sharing systems for VSNs can neither provide secure selective one-to-many data sharing and verifiable data retrieval over encrypted data nor ensure that the integrity of retrieved data. In this paper, …

Bus Stops Improvements Along Utah Corridor Increase Ridership And Ada Accessibility, Keith Bartholomew

TREC Project Briefs

A bus stop can be anything from a simple signpost stuck in the grass, to a comfortable shelter with seating and paved access to the sidewalk. For many U.S. transit agencies across the country, improving facilities at bus stops is a priority. But how much do these improvements actually affect ridership? A lot, it turns out. A new NITC study, co-funded by the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) and led by Keith Bartholomew of the University of Utah, found a 5.9% increase in boardings after improvements were made to a series of bus stops in Salt Lake City - compared to …

Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Novel Access Modes: A Case Study In The San Francisco Bay Area, Caroline Rodier, Andrea Broaddus, Miguel Jaller, Jeffery Song, Joschka Bischoff, Yunwan Zhang

Mineta Transportation Institute

The first-mile, last-mile problem is a significant deterrent for potential transit riders, especially in suburban neighborhoods with low density. Transit agencies have typically sought to solve this problem by adding parking spaces near transit stations and adding stops to connect riders to fixed-route transit. However, these measures are often only short-term solutions. In the last few years, transit agencies have tested whether new mobility services, such as ridehailing, ridesharing, and microtransit, can offer fast, reliable connections to and from transit stations. However, there is limited research that evaluates the potential impacts of these projects. Concurrently, there is growing interest in …

The Mismeasurement Of Mobility For Walkable Neighborhoods, Sherman Lewis, Emilio Grande, Ralph Robinson

Mineta Transportation Institute

The major US household travel surveys do not ask the right questions to understand mobility in Walkable Neighborhoods. Yet few subjects can be more important for sustainability and real economic growth based on all things of value, including sustainability, affordability, and quality of life. Walkable Neighborhoods are a system of land use, transportation, and transportation pricing. They are areas with attractive walking distances of residential and local business land uses of sufficient density to support enough business and transit, with mobility comparable to suburbia and without owning an auto.

Mobility is defined as the travel time typically spent to reach …

Data Files: The Role Of Bus Stop Features In Facilitating Accessibility, Keith Batholomew, Ja Young Kim, Divya Chandrasekhar, Reid Ewing, Arlie Adkins, Samuel Jensen

TREC Datasets and Databases

These datasets support a final report published on NITC’s website “The Role of Bus Stop Features in Facilitating Accessibility”: https://nitc.trec.pdx.edu/research/project/1214.

The DOI for the final report is: https://dx.doi.org/10.15760/trec.254.

Online Traffic Signal Control Through Sample-Based Constrained Optimization, Srishti Dhamija, Alolika Gon, Pradeep Varakantham, William Yeoh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traffic congestion reduces productivity of individuals by increasing time spent in traffic and also increases pollution. To reduce traffic congestion by better handling dynamic traffic patterns, recent work has focused on online traffic signal control. Typically, the objective in traffic signal control is to minimize expected delay over all vehicles given the uncertainty associated with the vehicle turn movements at intersections. In order to ensure responsiveness in decision making, a typical approach is to compute a schedule that minimizes the delay for the expected scenario of vehicle movements instead of minimizing expected delay over the feasible vehicle movement scenarios. Such …

Reducing Vehicle Miles Traveled, Encouraging Walk Trips, And Facilitating Efficient Trip Chains Through Polycentric Development, Reid Ewing, Keunhyun Park, Sadegh Sabouri, Torrey Lyons, Keuntae Kim, Dong-Ah Choi, Katherine Daly, Roya Etminani Ghasrodashti

TREC Final Reports

Compact development can result in many benefits for communities and residents. Areas can connect compact developments through high-quality transportation options, creating a network of centers, or a “polycentric” region. This development pattern is very popular in Europe and is linked to significant benefits. Salt Lake County has organically developed several small centers, and with the right strategies could continue to fuel this kind of growth. The metropolitan planning organization (MPO) for the region, the Wasatch Front Regional Council, has been planning for polycentric development since the Wasatch Choice for 2040 Vision was released in 2010. Our research is aimed at …

Regional Transportation Goals: Reducing Sprawl Through Interconnected Centers, Reid Ewing

TREC Project Briefs

A “polycentric” region is a network of compact developments (centers) that are connected with each other through high-quality transportation options. As the antidote to sprawling suburbs, compact centers can encourage all the things that sprawl discourages: public health, environmental sustainability, social cohesion, and economic diversity. But how can metropolitan planning organizations ensure that their regional plans will actually meet these goals? Polycentric development has been advocated by urban and transportation planners for more than a decade. However, effective practice must be backed by solid research, and to date there has been little or no research that quantifies the transportation benefits …

Non-Conventional Vehicles As A Way Towards Carbon Neutrality In Iceland, Julia Sokolowska

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Paris Agreement’s chief objective is to protect the Earth and its inhabitants from a point of no return, when the effects of climate change will be so intense that they will shift the equilibrium of ecosystems. The distinctiveness of this international environmental treaty is that it does not impose climate change mitigation measures, but rather allows nation states to create their own set of measures, the NDCs, to reach the global warming of ‘well below 2oC’ by the end of the century. Thus, Iceland has submitted its own NDC, the Climate Action Plan 2018-2030, which has an ambitious goal of …

The Role Of Bus Stop Features In Facilitating Accessibility, Keith Bartholomew, Ja Young Kim, Divya Chandrasekhar, Reid Ewing, Arlie Adkins, Samuel Jensen

TREC Final Reports

Although transit decision-makers and riders generally favor improving bus stops by adding shelters, benches, and similar features, it is unclear the impact such features have on transit demand and there has been little research that measures these impacts. This study examines the link between stop improvements and changes in stop-level boardings on scheduled-service buses and in ADA paratransit demand in the Salt Lake City, UT, metropolitan area between 2014 and 2017. The study also investigates current bus stop improvement practices of leading transit agencies nationwide. The study uses a number of quantitative and qualitative techniques, including propensity score matching, propensity …

Promoting Transit-Oriented Developments By Addressing Barriers Related To Land Use, Zoning, And Value Capture, Shishir Mathur, Aaron Gatdula

Mineta Transportation Institute

This study advances land use, transportation planning, and public finance research by identifying: a) the various land use, zoning, and value capture-related barriers to the construction of transit-oriented developments (TODs); and b) the major strategies that are commonly used or could be used to address these barriers. The value capture (VC) tools include joint development projects, tax increment financing, special assessments, lease/sale of land or air rights, and impact fees. The research finds that while a large proportion of jurisdictions across the US have TODs, land use, zoning, and VC-related barriers often impede their construction. Most transit agencies are not …

Freight Demand Model For Southern California Freeways With Owner–Operator Truck Drivers, Joseph J. Kim, Samuel Dominguez, Luis Diaz

Mineta Transportation Institute

This study evaluates the demand for truck-only toll lanes on Southern California freeways with owner–operator truck drivers. The study implemented the stated preference survey method to estimate the value placed by drivers on time, reliability, and safety measures using various scenarios geared towards assessing those values. The project team met face-to-face with owner- operator truck drivers near the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to understand the drivers’ perspectives regarding truck-only toll lanes on Southern California freeways. A data set containing 31 survey responses is obtained and used for statistical data analysis using analysis of variable (ANOVA) and two …

Impact Of Regular And Narrow Av-Exclusive Lanes On Manual Driver Behavior, Sahar Ghanipoor Machiani, Aryan Sohrabi, Arash Jahangiri

Mineta Transportation Institute

This study attempts to answer the question of how a narrow (9-ft) lane dedicated to Automated Vehicles (AVs) would affect the behavior of drivers in the adjacent lane to the right. To this end, a custom driving simulator environment was designed mimicking the Interstate 15 smart corridor in San Diego. A group of participants was assigned to drive next to the simulated 9-ft narrow lane while a control group was assigned to drive next to a regular 12-ft AV lane. Driver behavior was analyzed by measuring the mean lane position, mean speed, and mental effort (self-reported/subjective measure). In addition to …

Southern California Regional Workforce Development Needs Assessment For The Transportation And Supply Chain Industry Sectors, Tom O’Brien, Deanna Matsumoto, Diana Sanchez, Caitlin Mace, Elizabeth Warren, Eleni Hala, Tyler Reeb

Mineta Transportation Institute

COVID-19 brought the public’s attention to the critical value of transportation and supply chain workers as lifelines to access food and other supplies. This report examines essential job skills required of the middle-skill workforce (workers with more than a high school degree, but less than a four-year college degree). Many of these middle-skill transportation and supply chain jobs are what the Federal Reserve Bank defines as “opportunity occupations” -- jobs that pay above median wages and can be accessible to those without a four-year college degree. This report lays out the complex landscape of selected technological disruptions of the supply …

Road Traffic Accident Research In India: A Scientometric Study From 1977 To 2020, Dr. Jayaprakash G. Hugar, Dr. Mirza Muhammad Naseer, Dr. Abu Waris, Muhammad Ajmal Khan

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study carried out the scientometric analysis of road traffic accident research in India from 1977 to 2020. It aimed to examine type of publications with their citations and usage, the year wise publication and citation growth, most preferred journals, authors’ preference of keywords used, collaboration of Indian authors, authorship pattern and most prolific authors, and top contributing organizations. During 44 years of study, 1,132 research items were published and indexed in Web of Science (WoS) bibliographic database. Analysis discovered that number of publications increased from one (0.08%) in 1977 to 182 (16.07%) in 2018 and observed good progress in …

Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach To Solve Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem With Stochastic Customers, Waldy Joe, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In real-world urban logistics operations, changes to the routes and tasks occur in response to dynamic events. To ensure customers’ demands are met, planners need to make these changes quickly (sometimes instantaneously). This paper proposes the formulation of a dynamic vehicle routing problem with time windows and both known and stochastic customers as a route-based Markov Decision Process. We propose a solution approach that combines Deep Reinforcement Learning (specifically neural networks-based TemporalDifference learning with experience replay) to approximate the value function and a routing heuristic based on Simulated Annealing, called DRLSA. Our approach enables optimized re-routing decision to be generated …

Traffic Scorecard In Mountain West Cities, Kelliann Beavers, Eshaan Vakil, Katie M. Gilbertson, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Transportation & Infrastructure

This fact sheet presents congestion and mobility trends in 14 Mountain West cities as compiled by INRIX Research and author Trevor Reed, in the Global Traffic Scorecard, March 2020. The INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard examines the impact of vehicle travel on 975 congested cities in the world; this fact sheet focuses on the Mountain West, providing insight on the ranking and impacts of congestion. This fact sheet also supplements INRIX’s scorecard with population data from the U.S. Census Bureau to provide context for the rankings.

Bus Frequency Optimization: When Waiting Time Matters In User Satisfaction, Songsong Mo, Zhifeng Bao, Baihua Zheng, Zhiyong Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reorganizing bus frequency to cater for the actual travel demand can save the cost of the public transport system significantly. Many, if not all, existing studies formulate this as a bus frequency optimization problem which tries to minimize passengers’ average waiting time. However, many investigations have confirmed that the user satisfaction drops faster as the waiting time increases. Consequently, this paper studies the bus frequency optimization problem considering the user satisfaction. Specifically, for the first time to our best knowledge, we study how to schedule the buses such that the total number of passengers who could receive their bus services …

Zone Path Construction (Zac) Based Approaches For Effective Real-Time Ridesharing, Meghna Lowalekar, Pradeep Varakantham, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time ridesharing systems such as UberPool, Lyft Line, GrabShare have become hugely popular as they reduce the costs for customers, improve per trip revenue for drivers and reduce traffic on the roads by grouping customers with similar itineraries. The key challenge in these systems is to group the "right" requests to travel together in the "right" available vehicles in real-time, so that the objective (e.g., requests served, revenue or delay) is optimized. This challenge has been addressed in existing work by: (i) generating as many relevant feasible (with respect to the available delay for customers) combinations of requests as possible …

Pricing And Equilibrium In On-Demand Ride-Pooling Markets, Jintao Ke, Hai Yang, Xinwei Li, Hai Wang, Jieping Ye

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the recent rapid growth of technology-enabled mobility services, ride-sourcing platforms, such as Uber and DiDi, have launched commercial on-demand ride-pooling programs that allow drivers to serve more than one passenger request in each ride. Without requiring the prearrangement of trip schedules, these programs match on-demand passenger requests with vehicles that have vacant seats. Ride-pooling programs are expected to offer benefits for both individual passengers in the form of cost savings and for society in the form of traffic alleviation and emission reduction. In addition to some exogenous variables and environments for ride-sourcing market, such as city size and population …

Urban Transportation System Flood Vulnerability Assessment With Special Reference To Low Income And Minority Neighborhoods, Courtney Crosson, Daoqin Tong, Yinan Zhang

TREC Final Reports

A flood vulnerability assessment of the City of Tucson, Arizona’s transportation systems was conducted with special reference to low-income and minority neighborhoods. Short-term flooding from extreme storm events pose a serious challenge to transportation system reliability and emergency response in cities across the United States. This problem, which is anticipated to grow over the next century due to climate change, is often hardest on vulnerable populations, including low-income and minority neighborhoods. Our work aimed to advance national research methods for assessing multi-modal transportation degradation due to flooding. We identified priority locations for Tucson to make transportation improvement investments for the …

The Potential Of Green Infrastructure In Mitigating Flood Impacts On The Mobility Of Low Income And Minority Neighborhoods, Courtney Crosson, Yinan Zhang, Daoqin Tong

TREC Project Briefs

Short-term flooding from extreme storm events poses a serious transportation challenge in U.S. cities. This problem—which is anticipated to grow over the next century with our global climate crisis—is often hardest on vulnerable populations, including low-income and minority neighborhoods. This project advances national research methods for assessing flood vulnerability and prioritizing transportation improvement investments to ensure that no community is left stranded when the next flood occurs.

Automatic Traffic Monitoring And Management For Pedestrian And Cyclist Safety Using Deep Learning And Artificial Intelligence, Mohammad Pourhomayoun

Mineta Transportation Institute

In this project, we have designed and developed an effective end-to-end system based on advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and computer vision to automatically monitor, detect, track, and count pedestrians and bicyclists. The main objective of this project is to improve the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists, by applying self-sensed and AI-powered systems to monitor and control the flow of pedestrians/bicyclists. The developed system includes algorithms for detecting the pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as algorithms for tracking and counting the pedestrians. We evaluated the developed system on real videos captured by actual traffic cameras in the city of …

A Genetic Algorithm To Minimise Number Of Vehicles In An Electric Vehicle Routing Problem, Kiian Leong Bertran Queck, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Electric Vehicles (EVs) and charging infrastructure are starting to become commonplace in major cities around the world. For logistics providers to adopt an EV fleet, there are many factors up for consideration, such as route planning for EVs with limited travel range as well as long-term planning of fleet size. In this paper, we present a genetic algorithm to perform route planning that minimises the number of vehicles required. Specifically, we discuss the challenges on the violations of constraints in the EV routing problem (EVRP) arising from applying genetic algorithm operators. To overcome the challenges, techniques specific to addressing the …