Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Potential Of Existing And Proposed Bicycle Facilities To Link Multiple Origin And Destination Needs For Non-Motorized Travel In San Luis Obispo, Sheridan Nansen

City and Regional Planning

The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential of linking multiple origins and destinations for efficient non-motorized travel in San Luis Obispo, California. The city currently has seventy-five miles of bicycle infrastructure with the intention to add thirty-five more miles to create a more functional bicycle network and foster an increase in bicycle trips taken.

Many cities in the United States are following their European counterparts in the push towards more sustainable forms of transportation by promoting bicycling, walking, and the use of public transit. Recently, we have seen an increase in both local and national legislative efforts …

Bike And Pedestrian Safety Planning: Excelsior/Outer Mission District, Alexandra Lee-Gardner

City and Regional Planning

San Francisco’s Outer Mission and Excelsior districts host a vibrant community of small business owners and residents from a variety of backgrounds and cultures. The neighborhood is known for its diversity and sense of community. However, lack of adequate infrastructure and high-speed roadways has created great safety concerns within the community. In the last five years, the Excelsior/Outer Mission area had 828 collisions, nine of which were fatal (Transbase, n.d.). San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) has identified nearly 14 miles of streets in the project area that are on the City’s high injury network, meaning collisions there are highly …

Discovering Synergies Among Sustainable Rating Systems In Green Roof Analysis, Kanaan Hardaway

Biological and Agricultural Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

As awareness has grown of the impacts the built environment has on the natural environment and the human psyche, methods to create more sustainable living environment have been developed. Green infrastructure is well-known for its environmental benefits. Emerging literature suggests green infrastructure have aesthetic qualities conducive to mental restoration, as well. To analyze the multi-benefits of green infrastructure, a green roof is studied for its aesthetic qualities and its impact on LEED, SITES, and WELL certification. A questionnaire was administered to individuals on the University of Arkansas campus to quantify human perceptions and attitudes toward a green roof on a …

Countermeasures For Pedestrian-Involved Accidents On Interstate-Highways, Anna C. Hunter

Civil Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Pedestrian access to the Interstate is prohibited, but many pedestrian-involved accidents still occur on the Interstate in the United States. This project is a case study of West Memphis, Arkansas, which has the second highest occurrence of pedestrian-involved accidents on the Interstate in Arkansas. The study site location includes a segment of Interstate I-40 which is at- grade. The surrounding area contains several different land-uses, which is believed to be the primary generator of these accidents. The goal of this project is to determine the primary causes of these accidents and determine potential countermeasures to reduce the crash rate for …

Decision-Support System For Lid Footprint Planning And Urban Runoff Mitigation In The Lower Rio Grande Valley Of South Texas, Javier Guerrero, Taufiqul Alam, Ahmed Mahmoud, Kim D. Jones, Andrew Ernest

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

To address regional flooding in the United States, federal and state agencies are adopting strict drainage policies in any large-scale commercial development within the watershed boundary. The conventional approach of implementing a wet detention pond (WP) reduces the land cover and causes operation and maintenance challenges eventually. The present study developed a decision-support system (DSS) in the Lower Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas for optimal selection of Best Management Practices (BMPs) by substituting a portion of the WP footprint with three regionally promising low-impact development practices, namely, porous concrete pavement (PCP), bioretention (BR), and bioswale (BS). Source Load …

Pavement Management System Research Output: A Scientometric Assessment, Shabir Hussain Khahro, Zubair Ahmed Memon, Nur Izzi Md. Yusoff Dr, Lillian Gungat, Muhamad Razuhanafi Mat Yazid

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Developing countries are struggling with cost management of pavement construction and rehabilitation. This case is similar to developedcountries butdeveloping countries are suffering issues of inadequate funds. Therefore, most of the countries started usage of Pavement Management Systems (PMS) to manage the decision-making process and alternate/priority assessments for pavement construction and rehabilitation. Hence, the PMS remains the topic of research interest for various researchers. This paper evaluates the scale and effectiveness of articles published by Web of Science (WoS) Group on PMS since 1990. The data has been collected from the WoS database from 1990 till 2020. The datawas processedand analyzed …

Post-Overlay Flexible Pavement Performance Modeling And Its Application In Sustainable Asphalt Overlay Policy Making, Chunfu Xin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Highway pavement is a critical component of the highway transportation infrastructure. After the construction of a pavement system, pavement condition will deteriorate over time due to a combination effect of material aging, traffic loading, and environmental impact. To restore the pavement performance and to reduce its adverse effects on public users and environment, asphalt overlay activities are conducted frequently during the service life of a pavement. As a key component that bridges the overlay policies with future pavement performance, economic cost and environmental impact, the forecast accuracy of post-overlay pavement performance model is extremely important. However, most of previous studies …

Water Quality Improvement And Pollutant Removal By Two Regional Detention Facilities With Constructed Wetlands In South Texas, Javier Guerrero, Ahmed Mahmoud, Taufiqul Alam, Muhammed A. Chowdhury, Adeniyi Adetayo, Andrew Ernest, Kim D. Jones

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

Stormwater runoff introduces several pollutants to the receiving water bodies that may cause degradation of the water quality. Stormwater management systems such as detention facilities and wetland can improve the water quality by removing various pollutants associated with the runoff. The objective of this research project is to determine the performance and efficiency of two major regional detention facilities (RDFs) with different designs and structures in reducing pollutants based on various storm events in McAllen, Texas. The two sites are the McAuliffe RDF and the Morris RDF; each site was incorporated with a constructed wetland with a different design and …

Truck Trailer Classification Using Side-Fire Light Detection And Ranging (Lidar) Data, Olcay Sahin

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Classification of vehicles into distinct groups is critical for many applications, including freight and commodity flow modeling, pavement management and design, tolling, air quality monitoring, and intelligent transportation systems. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) developed a standardized 13-category vehicle classification ruleset, which meets the needs of many traffic data user applications. However, some applications need high-resolution data for modeling and analysis. For example, the type of commodity being carried must be known in the freight modeling framework. Unfortunately, this information is not available at the state or metropolitan level, or it is expensive to obtain from current resources.

Nevertheless, using …

A Rule Based Control Algorithm For On-Ramp Merge With Connected And Automated Vehicles, Ehsan Beheshtitabar

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

One of the designs for future highways with the flow of Connected Automated Vehicles (CAVs) cars will be a dedicated lane for the CAVs to form platoons and travel with higher speeds and lower headways. The connectivity will enable the formation of platoons of CAVs traveling beside non-platoon lanes. The advent of connectivity between vehicles and the infrastructure will enable advanced control strategies ̶ improving the performance of the traffic ̶ to be incorporated in the traffic system. The merge area in a multilane highway with CAVs is one of the sections which can be enhanced by the operation of …

Nurturing Diversity In The Workplace, Julian Hayes, Sarah Baty

Purdue Road School

A workplace with people of varying genders, ages, religions, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and cultural backgrounds leads to greater innovation, reduced employee turnover, and other competitive advantages. Learn more about the benefits of workplace diversity and tips for nurturing diversity and inclusion where you work. In addition to sharing the latest research and best practices, this session will also include the speakers’ personal experiences with building positive change at HNTB Indiana.

The Future State Of Mobility, Jerome Quandt

Purdue Road School

Formed in 2018, the Illinois Autonomous Vehicles Association (ILAVA) is a privately funded non-for-profit organization focused on establishing thought leadership in the state of Illinois, by identifying and addressing the current and emerging opportunities related to the inevitable growth of CAV technologies throughout the transportation network. Through the deployment of scalable and sustainable business solutions, facilitating industry education and establishing thought leadership, ILAVA is creating an ecosystem that defines Illinois as #TheFutureStateofMobility.

A Rapid Transit Success, Lauren Day, Jennifer Pyrz

Purdue Road School

Indianapolis’s first Bus Rapid Transit line opened in September 2019. Leading up to and through its construction, IndyGo imple-mented a range of public engagement tech-niques, from traditional public meetings to small group gatherings to one-on-one engagements. This presentation will highlight the methods of outreach utilized, discuss IndyGo’s motivation behind getting down to the personal level, and share some of the lessons IndyGo will carry forward into its next BRT lines.

Giving Voice To Silent Stakeholders, Mindy Peterson, Will Wingfield

Purdue Road School

Only the most motivated stakeholders attend public meetings or submit written comments. To ensure that more people and quieter voices are heard, transportation agencies are supplement-ing public-involvement efforts with interactive, mobile-friendly surveys and in-person inter-views. Learn how tech tools are being used on projects such as the Sherman Minton Renewal to involve the public and provide more data to decision makers.

A Bibliometric Analysis Of Soil Pollution Due To Microplastics, Sangita Dike, Sayali Apte

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Microplastic pollution is a global problem because of its ecological and socioeconomic impacts on the environment. The large size plastic waste, under the action of ultraviolet radiation, pressure, and wind or wave action, breaks down into particles smaller than 5 mm referred to as microplastic. This huge amount of microplastic enters the ecosystem eventually leading to soil pollution. It has been established that microplastics enter the food chain when animals eat or ingest contaminated food materials.and have an adverse effect on human health The present paper investigates, past researches in the area of microplastic pollution of soil, by a detailed …

Guidelines For Using Streetlight Data For Planning Tasks, Hong Yang, Mecit Cetin, Qingyu Ma

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) has purchased a subscription to the StreetLight (SL) Data products that mainly offer origin-destination (OD) related metrics through crowdsourcing data. Users can manipulate a data source like this to quickly estimate origin-destination trip tables. Nonetheless, the SL metrics heavily rely on the data points sampled from smartphone applications and global positioning services (GPS) devices, which may be subject to potential bias and coverage issues. In particular, the quality of the SL metrics in relation to meeting the needs of various VDOT work tasks is not clear. Guidelines on the use of the SL metrics …

Crime And Harassment On Public Transportation: A Survey Of Sjsu Students Set In International Context, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Cristina Tortora, Yajing Hu

Mineta Transportation Institute

Communities around the world are gradually becoming aware that transit riders, and especially women, are often victims of a wide range of offenses of a sexual nature that happen on buses and trains, and at bus stops and train stations. Better understanding the extent and nature of sexual harassment on transit is a critical issue for transit operators and society at large. If fear of sexual crime limits if and how people ride transit, the result is reduced mobility for certain segments of the population, as well as lost ridership for transit agencies.

For this study, we surveyed 891 students …

Wireless Underground Communications In Sewer And Stormwater Overflow Monitoring: Radio Waves Through Soil And Asphalt Medium, Usman Raza, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

Storm drains and sanitary sewers are prone to backups and overflows due to extra amount wastewater entering the pipes. To prevent that, it is imperative to efficiently monitor the urban underground infrastructure. The combination of sensors system and wireless underground communication system can be used to realize urban underground IoT applications, e.g., storm water and wastewater overflow monitoring systems. The aim of this article is to establish a feasibility of the use of wireless underground communications techniques, and wave propagation through the subsurface soil and asphalt layers, in an underground pavement system for storm water and sewer overflow monitoring application. …

Probabilistic Hazard Assessment Of Contaminated Sediment In Rivers, Shahab Aldin Shojaeezadeh, Mohammad Reza Nikoo, Ali Mirchi, Iman Mallakpour, Amir Aghakouchak, Mojtaba Sadegh

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

We propose a probabilistic framework rooted in multivariate and copula theory to assess heavy metal hazard associated with contaminated sediment in freshwater rivers that provide crucial ecosystem services such as municipal water source, eco-tourism, and agricultural irrigation. Exploiting the dependence structure between suspended sediment concentration (SSC) and different heavy metals, we estimate the hazard probability associated with each heavy metal at different SSC levels. We derive these relationships for warm (spring-summer) and cold (fall-winter) seasons, as well as stormflow condition, to unpack their nonlinear associations under different environmental conditions. To demonstrate its efficacy, we apply our proposed generic framework to …

Construction Labor Productivity Modeling And Use Of Neural Networks: A Bibliometric Survey, Shalaka Hire, Sayali Sandbhor

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Productivity of a project has a major impact on its cost and profitability. In spite of construction being labor intensive field with labor cost adding up to 30% to 50% of overall project cost, the productivity of labor is one of the least studied areas in the construction industry. It requires to be given due attention to the issues affecting labor productivity and design solution using soft computing techniques to improve the overall performance of the industry. This research paper aims to conduct a bibliographic survey of the literature available in the domain of Labor Productivity (LP) as well as …

Challenges Of International Development Projects In Yemen: Perspective Of Public Work Project, Mohammed Lashuel Hassan Mohammed

Student Works (2020-2029)

International development projects are public projects that are created to support the economy and people’s life needs, mostly these types of projects target developing countries. These types of projects face challenges more than other projects due to many reasons. Accordingly, this research aims to explore the challenges that face international development projects in Yemen and conducted by the Public Work Project and highlight the most significant issues that face ID project as well to overcome these challenges. This research adopted the qualitative method by conducting ten semi-structured interviews with the PWP team and others stakeholders. The interview technique was selected …

A New Materials And Design Approach For Roads, Bridges, Pavement, And Concrete, Alan Fuchs, Tathagata Acharya, Luis Cabrales, Jesse Bergkamp, Nyakundi Michieka

Mineta Transportation Institute

Increased understanding of demand for transport energy and how to improve road pavement materials would enable decision makers to make environmental, financial, and other positive changes in future planning and design of roads, bridges, and other important transportation structures. This research comprises three studies focused on pavement materials and a fourth study that examines energy demand within the road transportation sector. These studies are as follows:

1. A techno-economic study of ground tire rubber as an asphalt modifier;

2. A computational fluid dynamics analysis comparing the urban heat island effect of two different pavement materials – asphalt and Portland Cement …

Mitigation Localized Flooding - Development Of A Green Infrastructure Master Plan In The Lower Rio Grande Valley, Andrew Ernest, Javier Guerrero, Ahmed Mahmoud, Roxana Tello, Jose Figueroa, Jorge Hernandez

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

The City of Mercedes in partnership with the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) and The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) proposed to develop a demonstration green infrastructure (GI) master plan to mitigate localized flooding in a high priority region within the city limits of the City. Local governments in the LRGV control localized flooding and stormwater runoff by adopting strict drainage design policies. During the course of this project, participating in local governments and the project team reviewed the city drainage policy. The project team identified those that already incorporate GI language, provided GI related information to the …

Perceived Neighborhood: Preferences Versus Actualities, Saeed Moradi, Ali Nejat, Da Hu, Souparno Ghosh

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

Housing recovery plays a key role in the overall restoration of a community. A multitude of factors affect housing recovery, many of which are associated with interactions of residents with their perceived neighborhoods. Targeting perceived neighborhoods rather than administratively defined measures of land helps with devising recovery plans that could better address social preferences of the residents. However, such measures are commonly subject to collection of information via expensive and time-consuming surveys. The current research aims to contribute to the domain by exploring the relationship between perception of households of their neighborhood anchors (perceived anchors) and the anchors that exist …

The Integration Between Strategy Formulation And Implementationin Construction Contracting Firms In Ireland, Ahmed Hassan

Doctoral

The role of the construction sector in Ireland is critical in terms of the economic and social development however the economic, competitive, and regulatory business environment present a myriad of complexities to firms operating within the sector. The importance of strategic planning for business survival and prosperity has been well documented over several decades of research but there remains a paucity of empirical evidence to determine the in strategic decision-making process under these volatile environmental conditions.This study addresses the perceptible gap in existing knowledge by investigating the characteristics of the strategy strategic decision-making process, strategic choices, and implementation process in …

Valuing Public Transport Customer Amenities: International Transit Agency Practice, Chris De Gruyter, Graham Currie

Journal of Public Transportation

Public transport customer amenities cover a range of measures that can enhance the quality of the passenger experience, such as information provision and station quality. While much research has determined the value that users place on amenities, there is little understanding of current practice in the use of customer amenity valuations in project appraisal. A survey of transit agencies in 11 cities (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Auckland, London, Paris, Toronto, Vienna, Oslo and Singapore) was undertaken showing that Australasian cities, albeit Melbourne, generally have widespread inclusion of customer amenities as part of advanced appraisals for all relevant types of public …

Exploring Low-Carbon Bus Options For Urban Brt Systems: The Case Of Amman, Rana Imam, Seong-Cheol Kang, Diana Quezada

Journal of Public Transportation

Being able to provide high-quality, metro-like transit service at a fraction of the cost of other options, bus rapid transit (BRT) has been viewed as one of the most cost-effective public mass transport systems suitable for urban areas. Considering significant amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) and air pollutant emissions are attributed to the transport sector, deploying low carbon buses for BRT systems should be of high priority. With a view to promoting low carbon buses instead of diesel buses for a BRT system currently being planned in Amman, Jordan, this paper evaluates several low carbon bus options – hybrid, plug-in …

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 …

Public Perception Of Different Planting Techniques Using Augmented Reality, Sultana Quader Tania

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this study was to measure public perception of the different planting techniques (block and matrix), which are used at visitor information centers (VICs) and other rights of way (ROW) areas. The main factors that affect public perception of planting techniques were identified through an extensive literature review and qualitative survey from four welcome centers in the state of Georgia. The ranking of those indicators, based on public preferences, was discovered through a quantitative survey. During the first phase of the quantitative survey, images of block and matrix were used. An iOS-based user-friendly and cost-effective augmented reality (AR) …

Elements Of Safety Management System In The Construction Industry And Measuring Safety Performance – A Brief, Mostafa Elsebaei, Omar Elnawawy, Ayman Ahmed Ezzat Othman, Mohamed Badawy

Architectural Engineering

Construction industry is considered to be one of the most hazardous industries in the world. The reason could be attributed to its hazardous nature as it is an accident-prone industry. Thus, a need for better understanding of safety management system is essential for improving safety performance in this sector. This paper discusses briefly the elements of safety management by presenting different systems (such as Oregon OSHA Occupational Health and Safety Administration, and OTAR Overseas Territories Aviation Circle) and elaborating their elements. It also discusses two types of measuring safety performance the first is the lagging indicators and the second is …