Engineering Commons^™

Understanding The Linkages Between Urban Transportation Design And Population Exposure To Traffic-Related Air Pollution: Application Of An Integrated Transportation And Air Pollution Modeling Framework To Tampa, Fl, Sashikanth Gurram

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rapid and unplanned urbanization has ushered in a variety of public health challenges, including exposure to traffic pollution and greater dependence on automobiles. Moreover, vulnerable population groups often bear the brunt of negative outcomes and are subject to disproportionate exposure and health effects. This makes it imperative for urban transportation engineers, land use planners, and public health professionals to work synergistically to understand both the relationship between urban design and population exposure to traffic pollution, and its social distribution. Researchers have started to pay close attention to this connection, mainly by conducting observational studies on the relationship between transportation, urban …

Improving Service Level Of Free-Floating Bike Sharing Systems, Aritra Pal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bike Sharing is a sustainable mode of urban mobility, not only for regular commuters but also for casual users and tourists. Free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) is an innovative bike sharing model, which saves on start-up cost, prevents bike theft, and offers significant opportunities for smart management by tracking bikes in real-time with built-in GPS. Efficient management of a FFBS requires: 1) analyzing its mobility patterns and spatio-temporal imbalance of supply and demand of bikes, 2) developing strategies to mitigate such imbalances, and 3) understanding the causes of a bike getting damaged and developing strategies to minimize them. All of these …

Water, Sanitation, And Citizenship: Perceptions Of Water Scarcity, Reuse, And Sustainability In Valparaiso De Goias, Brazil, Paola Andrea Gonzalez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Access to reliable water and sanitation are two important goals to improve livelihoods around the world. Providing access to improved and safe water resources that are equitable and appropriate to local needs is important to improve sustainability long-term. In addition, framing access to water and sanitation as basic human rights is often used as a rationale in developing new water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions in developing countries around the world. But not all countries consider access to safe water and sanitation as a human right. In the thesis, the politics of improving and investment in water access and sanitation provision …

How Transportation Network Companies Could Replace Public Transportation In The United States, Matthew L. Kessler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The quantity of cell phone applications or mobile apps have seen an upsurge at an exponential rate in under a decade. Many have been created for a variety of industries, including transportation. The advent and subsequent commercialized implementation of near-instant transport by a middleman-type of app is now known as a Transportation Network Company or TNC. Examples of the more renowned TNCs are Uber, Lyft and Sidecar.

In recent years, TNCs have cultivated a tremendous following, to the degree of taxicab desertion. Moreover, the massive success of TNCs led to expansion of its capacities into public transportation.

The TNC’s expeditious …

Autonomous Vehicles: An Empirical Assessment Of Consumers’ Perceptions, Intended Adoption, And Impacts On Household Vehicle Ownership, Nikhil Menon

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Emerging automotive and transportation technologies have provided revolutionary possibilities in the way we might travel in the future. Major car manufacturers and technology giants have demonstrated significant progress in advancing and testing autonomous vehicles in real-life traffic conditions. Governmental agencies are grappling with how to plan transportation systems for a world with autonomous vehicles. Past research has shown that not all technologies are immediately welcomed by the public. Autonomous Vehicles would have to likely go through a similar phase, and would need to overcome not just technological challenges but also social barriers for successful penetration into the marketplace. Most previous …

Space-Time Transportation System Modelling: From Traveler’S Characteristics To The Network Design Problem, Mohsen Parsafard

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Traditional network design problems only consider the long-term stationary travel patterns (e.g., fixed OD demand) and short-term variations of human mobility are ignored. This study aims to integrate human mobility characteristics and travel patterns into network design problems using a space-time network structure. Emerging technologies such as location-based social network platforms provide a unique opportunity for understanding human mobility patterns that can lead to advanced modeling techniques. To reach our goal, at first multimodal network design problems are investigated by considering safety and flow interactions between different modes of transport. We develop a network reconstruction method to expand a single-modal …