Transportation Engineering Commons^™

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 …

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 …

Using Machine Learning Technique To Develop A Deterioration Predicting Model For Pavement Marking In Florida, Ehab Abdelmaksoud

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Longitudinal pavement markings play a significant role on the roadways by delivering information to motorists to help them navigate and follow the road. These markings are also considered to be a crucial control device that can enhance ideal nighttime visibility, especially on rural roads where the surrounding luminance is insufficient. Hence, the main question for public agencies or officials is about when the replacement of the pavement markings needs to take place. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is considering proposing a minimum level of retroreflectivity standard and based on that, the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) set aside …

Generative Modeling Of Human Behavior: Social Interaction And Networked Coordination In Shared Facilities, Saumya Gupta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Urbanization is bringing together various modes of transport, and with that, there are challenges to maintaining the safety of all road users, especially vulnerable road users (VRUs). Therefore, there is a need for street designs that encourages cooperation and resource sharing among road users. Shared space is a street design approach that softens the demarcation of vehicles and pedestrian traffic by reducing traffic rules, traffic signals, road markings, and regulations. Understanding the interactions and trajectory formations of various VRUs will facilitate the design of safer shared spaces. It will also lead to many applications, such as implementing reliable ad hoc …

Analytical Study Of Deep Learning Methods For Road Condition Assessment, Elham Eslami

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Automated pavement distress recognition is a key step in smart infrastructure assessment. Advances in deep learning and computer vision have improved the automated recognition of pavement distresses in road surface images. This task, however, remains challenging due to the high variations in road objects and pavement types, variety of lighting condition, low contrast, and background noises in pavement images. In this dissertation, we propose novel deep learning algorithms for image-based road condition assessment to tackle current challenges in detection, classification and segmentation of pavement images. Motivated by the need for classifying a wide range of objects in road monitoring, this …

Exact Algorithms For Practical Instances Of The Railcar Loading Problem At Marine Container Terminals, Manwo Ng, Dung-Ying Lin

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

With the growth in global trade and its environmental footprint, sustainable modes of freight movement are increasingly important in today’s globalized world. This study focuses on on-dock rail, where the rail terminal is located within the marine container terminal. On-dock rail has in recent years become an essential mode of transportation to move containers out of congested marine container terminals. This study contributes to the literature by presenting tailored exact solution algorithms for a recently proposed optimization model to optimize the loading of double-stack trains. In particular, a 3-stage solution framework is presented for the case when rail cars have …

An Econometric Analysis Of Domestic Aviation In The Us, Sudipta Dey Tirtha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In this dissertation, we examine two dimensions of domestic aviation - demand and delay - that directly influence economic impact of the sector. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of airline demand employing airline data compiled by Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The demand analysis is conducted in three steps. First, we propose a novel modeling approach for modeling airline demand evolution over time. Specifically, we develop a joint panel group generalized ordered probit (GGOP) model system for modeling air passenger arrivals and departures in a discretized framework that subsumes the traditional linear regression approach. Further, we consider the influence of observed …

Modeling Crash Severity And Collision Types Using Machine Learning, Amit Kumar, Hari Krishnan Melempat Kalapurayil

Data

Traffic safety analysis is the fundamental step for reducing economic, social, and environmental cost incurred due to traffic accidents. The essence of traffic safety is understanding the factors affecting crash occurrence, injury severity and collision type and their underlying relationships and predict-prevent future crash instances. Crash injury severity studies in past have utilized numerous statistical, econometric and Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to extract the underlying relationship between the crash causal factors and the consequent severity or collision type. The study aims to explore the Multi-Label Classification (MLC) tool from the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for …

Modeling Crash Severity And Collision Types Using Machine Learning, Amit Kumar, Hari Krishnan Melempat Kalapurayil

Publications

Traffic safety analysis is the fundamental step for reducing economic, social, and environmental cost incurred due to traffic accidents. The essence of traffic safety is understanding the factors affecting crash occurrence, injury severity and collision type and their underlying relationships and predict-prevent future crash instances. Crash injury severity studies in past have utilized numerous statistical, econometric and Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to extract the underlying relationship between the crash causal factors and the consequent severity or collision type. The study aims to explore the Multi-Label Classification (MLC) tool from the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for …

Biking In Indianapolis: An Ethnographic Analysis Of Obstacles And Solutions, Emory Lietz

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Indiana is known as the ""Crossroads of America"" for its historic investment in vehicle infrastructure. This focus on automobiles has shaped Indianapolis's urban landscape, to the dismay of many cyclists. Based on semi-structured interviews with a range of stakeholders in the Indianapolis cycling community, including urban planners, bike commuters, IndyGo employees, city government officials, and bike advocates, this project identifies and evaluates the current barriers that prevent Indianapolis residents from riding their bikes. These obstacles, which include infrastructural, safety, and social factors, make it more difficult than it ought to be to bike in Indy.

For my thesis project, I …

Optimizing Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Investments And Activities To Improve Safety And Increase Revenue Collections, Brian Howell, Jennifer Walton, Andrew Martin

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) owns and maintains 14 fixed weigh stations for commercial vehicle enforcement. The Kentucky State Police (KSP) is responsible for staffing these facilities to conduct enforcement, while KYTC is responsible for constructing and maintaining these facilities. Like many states, Kentucky has experienced a decline of enforcement personnel to operate weigh stations limiting its ability to conduct inspections for safety enforcement and revenue collection. This study analyzes three CMV facilities for their impact on safety enforcement and revenue collection and determines their viability for potential replacement. All three existing weigh stations in Hardin, Fulton, and Henderson counties …

Exploration Of The Characteristics And Trends Of Electric Vehicle Crashes: A Case Study In Norway, Chenhui Liu, Li Zhao, Chaoru Lu

Mid-America Transportation Center: Final Reports and Technical Briefs

With the rapid growth of electric vehicles (EVs) in the past decade, many new traffic safety challenges are also emerging. With the crash data of Norway from 2011 to 2018, this study gives an overview of the status quo of EV crashes. In the survey period, the proportion of EV crashes in total traffic crashes had risen from zero to 3.11% in Norway. However, in terms of severity, EV crashes do not show statistically significant differences from the Internal Combustion Engine Vehicle (ICEV) crashes. Compared to ICEV crashes, the occurrence of EV crashes features on weekday peak hours, urban areas, …

Distracted Driving And Pedestrians' Effects On Headway At Signalized Intersections, Bassel Elgamal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Distracted driving and pedestrians pose one of the most difficult challenges to ensuring a safe and efficient transportation system. Modern communications have delivered greater convenience. However, this has come at the cost of attention spans. Safety has been thoroughly explored in terms of distracted driving and pedestrians. However, impacts on traffic operations have received minimal research attention. Few studies provided a theoretical mechanism on how intersection operations can be affected but failed to quantify the real-life impacts on traffic operations. Furthermore, new Florida laws prohibit cellphone usage while driving but is allowed when the vehicle is stationary, which may result …

North 14th Street Corridor Improvements Project, Ashley Nguyen, Samantha Corey, Maricela Paramo Reyes, Pooja Rajeev

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The following project report was a study of the North 14^th Street corridor ranging from Adams Street to Virginia Street conducted by University of Nebraska-Lincoln students for a senior design capstone project. Main focuses of the project were the intersection of Adams and 14^th Street and the 14^th Street bridges over Cornhusker Highway and Oak Creek. Study of this area included work in transportation, traffic, structural, geotechnical, water resources, and environmental engineering. However, this report done by students should not take the place of work done by licensed professional engineers.

This project was done in collaboration with …

A Deep Learning Approach For Spatiotemporal-Data-Driven Traffic State Estimation, Amr Hatem Ragaa Abdelraouf

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The past decade witnessed rapid developments in traffic data sensing technologies in the form of roadside detector hardware, vehicle on-board units, and pedestrian wearable devices. The growing magnitude and complexity of the available traffic data has fueled the demand for data-driven models that can handle large scale inputs. In the recent past, deep-learning-powered algorithms have become the state-of-the-art for various data-driven applications. In this research, three applications of deep learning algorithms for traffic state estimation were investigated. Firstly, network-wide traffic parameters estimation was explored. An attention-based multi-encoder-decoder (Att-MED) neural network architecture was proposed and trained to predict freeway traffic speed …

Automated Vehicle To Vehicle Conflict Analysis At Signalized Intersections By Camera And Lidar Sensor Fusion, Alabi Mehzabin Anisha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This research presents an approach for safety diagnosis using sensor fusion techniques. This work fuses the outputs of a roadside low-resolution camera and a solid-state LiDAR. For vehicle classification and detection in videos, the YOLO v5 object detection model was utilized. The raw 3D point clouds generated by the LiDAR are processed by two manual steps - ground plane transformation and background segmentation, and two real-time steps - foreground clustering, and bounding box fitting. Taking the generated 2D bounding boxes of both camera and LiDAR, we associate the common bounding box pairs by thresholding on the Euclidean distance threshold of …

Assessing Public Perception And Proposing An Organized Questionnaire For The Deployment And Adoption Of Autonomous Vehicles, Md Rakibul Islam

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Since the general public will play a central role in the evolution of AVs, research has been performed to assess their perception and acceptance of AVs. Nevertheless, the most potential users of AVs, i.e., young, students, and more educated people, have not received any particular focus in those studies. This research gap has motivated us to assess their perceptions. Extensive data analyses of the survey at the University of Central Florida with a sample of 315 reveal that on average 57% of the respondents were familiar with AVs, and about 44% of the respondents felt positive perceptions toward AVs. Around …

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 …

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 …