Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Eav Fleet Management In Transportation And Power Systems, Dongfang Zhao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Electrical vehicles (EV) by the nature of the technology assume a dual role of supplying transportation mobility and storing electric power. Thus, operations of EV impact both transportation and power grid systems. The design of infrastructure and operations of EV fleet is critical to the benefit of both systems to the society. Thus, this study proposes three models to investigate the optimal design of the infrastructure in both systems and the operations of EV fleets: 1) a dynamic and time-continuous optimization model seeking the optimal design of charging station location and EAV deployment is developed in a station-based car-sharing service …

Longitudinal Trajectory Tracking Analysis For Autonomous Electric Vehicles Based On Pid Control, Hossein Amiri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The implementation of autonomous vehicles has huge potential for revolutionizing transportation as we currently know it. All use cases of autonomous vehicles require the vehicle to travel on a pre-specified path. Accurate tracking of this defined trajectory is a crucial aspect of the implementation of autonomous vehicles; a controller system is required to translate this pre- defined trajectory in the form of the throttle, brake, and steering inputs. This project covers the application of a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller to achieve longitudinal trajectory tracking of autonomous electric vehicles with stability and accuracy in the CARLA autonomous driving simulation platform. The implemented …

Designing Next-Generation Transportation Systems With Emerging Vehicle Technologies, Zhiwei Chen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent advances in computing and artificial intelligence have enabled the development of various emerging vehicle technologies, e.g., autonomous vehicles (AV) and modular autonomous vehicles (MAV). These technologies bring new scientific and engineering problems challenging transportation researchers and practitioners. This dissertation aims to develop a suite of scalable computational and analytical tools for designing and analyzing next-generation transportation systems with the MAV technologies. Also, we intend to empirically study the system impacts in terms of the quality of service, energy implications, and inequality impacts.

For MAV system design, we develop a methodological framework centering at theoretical properties of the optimal system …

Diagnosis Of Freeway Bottlenecks During The Mass Evacuation For Hurricane Irma On Florida's Turnpike Mainline, Brian Michael Staes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Prevailing traffic conditions were examined for a bottleneck that occurred on northbound SR-91 (Florida’s Mainline Turnpike) during the mass evacuation for Hurricane Irma in September 2017. Radar detector count, occupancy, and speed data polling at 1-minute intervals were collected from the Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS) and employed to identify the distinct periods one particular bottleneck was active at a service plaza along SR-91. With this rich data, three distinct periods were identified in which the bottleneck was active at a service plaza off-ramp, lasting a total of 27.5 hours during this colossal evacuation. To identify the activation time …

An Inferential Study Of The Potential Consumer Value Of Free Charging For Users Of Public Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure, Divyamitra Mishra

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although there is economic and marketing evidence of consumers assigning additional benefits to free products and bundles, there is limited research into the behavioral consequences of offering public electric vehicle charging for free. Previous exploratory research by Maness and Lin analyzed possible economic and environmental benefits from offering free public charging infrastructure and policy. Their work found that providing free public charging infrastructure could increase plug-in electric vehicle sales and cause decreased reliance on fossil fuels in the personal transportation sector. However, their study assumed the increased value which consumers would place on free charge events. This project proposes to …

A Multi-City Investigation Of The Effect Of Holidays On Bikeshare System Ridership, Lori Palaio

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bikeshare provides important first-mile last-mile, commuting, circulation, and sightseeing options in many cities. Bikeshare can also be healthy and convenient for users. Throughout the year, holidays occur which change typical bikeshare activity patterns. Existing literature shows mixed results relating to the ridership impacts of holidays, as some research shows that these days may result in higher ridership, while others show no effect. Because of variations in system locations and modeling methods, it is difficult to determine the reasons for these mixed results. To control for these aspects, this project consists of a multi-city study of the effect of holidays on …

Using Optimization Methods For Solving Problems In Sustainable Urban Mobility And Conservation Planning, Zulqarnain Haider

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation considers three separate optimization problems related to sustainable urban and environmental systems. The first problem relates to the nightly relocation and recharging operations for Free-floating electric vehicle sharing (FFEVS) systems. Such operations involve a crew of drivers to move the shared electric vehicles (EVs), and a fleet of shuttles to transport those drivers. Mixed integer programs are used to model the relocation and recharging operations. Two approaches are devised: sequential and synchronized approaches. In the sequential approach, the movement of EVs is first decided, then the routing of shuttles and drivers is determined. In the synchronized approach, all …

A South Florida Ethnography Of Mobile Home Park Residents Organizing Against Neoliberal Crony Capitalist Displacement, Juan Guillermo Ruiz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The cyclical inflations of real estate values right before the 2008 housing crisis in the United States enticed mobile home park landowners, especially in California and Florida, to sell their land in the search for spectacular profits displacing many low-income residents. This thesis uses an engaged anthropological ethnographic approach to explore the struggle in organizing against neoliberal crony capitalist displacement in the South Florida metropolitan area. The study focuses on Davie, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, where at the time of fieldwork a third of residents lived in mobile homes. In 2007, the Davie town council attempted to soften the …

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 …

Game Theory Approaches For Transportation Problems, Mahdi Takalloo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation considers three separate game theory problems in transportation. In the first problem, a combinatorial auction market has been proposed for fractional ownership of autonomous vehicles. The proposed combinatorial auction has two unique features. First, the items are continuous time slots defined by bidders and second, the spatial information of bidders has been incorporated so that sharing becomes a viable plan. A conflict-based formulation of the winner determination problem has been proposed, for which an effective solution approach based on a heuristic and a maximal-clique based relaxation has been presented. The second part of the dissertation examines a pessimistic …

Algorithms To Profile Driver Behavior From Zero-Permission Embedded Sensors, Bharti Goel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we design algorithms to profile driver behavior from zero-permission sensors embedded in modern smartphones and wearables. These sensors are typically the accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, pressure sensor and a few more than are now available in most modern smartphones and wearables. In order to profile driving behavior, we devised algorithms for detecting distraction while driving due to the use of modern-day smartphones (e.g., calling, texting and reading while driving) in real-time.

To do so, we conduct an experiment with 16 subjects on a realistic driving simulator, where each subject, where each subject carries a smartphone and a wearable …

Trajectory Based Traffic Analysis And Control Utilizing Connected Autonomous Vehicles, Yu Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent scholars have developed a number of stochastic car-following models that have successfully captured driver behavior uncertainties and reproduced stochastic traffic oscillation propagation. While elegant frequency domain analytical methods are available for stability analysis of classic deterministic linear car-following models, there lacks an analytical method for quantifying the stability performance of their peer stochastic models and theoretically proving oscillation features observed in the real world. To fill this methodological gap, this study proposes a novel analytical method that measures traffic oscillation magnitudes and reveals oscillation characteristics of stochastic linear car-following models. We investigate a general class of stochastic linear car-following …

Dynamic Prediction Of Runway Configuration And Airport Acceptance Rate, Yuan Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Automated prediction of runway configuration and airport capacity is critical for the future generation of air traffic management. In the future aviation industry, multi-sources weather forecast information will be available for air traffic decision-making units; how to use these data efficiently is key for overall efficiency of air traffic management. Currently, air traffic management personnel lack tools to assist them to translate weather forecast data into real-time airport capacity. Runway configurations and AARs of airports in a multi-airport system are determined by different air traffic controller personnel. The lack of synchronization may lead to the loss of efficiency of the …

Highway Lane Management Policy For Existing And Connected Autonomous Vehicles, Md Mokaddesul Hoque

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Trucks carry major bulk of freight in the U.S. and are likely to continue doing so in the near future for various reasons. They have tremendous impact on highway pavement design and on the costs of pavement construction, maintenance, and rehabilitation. Current policy of truck lane restriction ensures that they mostly use the outside lane(s) on multilane highways. This practice has considerable impact on the cost of pavement construction and rehabilitation. Right now, all the highway lanes are designed and constructed according to the truck load on the outside lane even though the inside lanes receive significantly smaller quantity of …

Interventions To Improve Older Driver Safety, Bernadette A. Fausto

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Increased longevity coupled with age-related declines that compromise driving safety and fragility render older adults as vulnerable road users (Oxley & Whelan, 2008). To address this public health concern, researchers continue to investigate interventions to improve older driver safety. The current dissertation consists of two papers examining: a) the state of the literature on older driver interventions and b) the efficacy of one approach, Useful Field of View cognitive training, to reduce at-fault crash involvement. The first paper sought to identify and quantify the effects of different interventions among older adults on outcomes of crashes, on-road driving performance, self-reported outcomes …

Sundaas Story: A Mixed-Methods Study Of Household Sanitation Provisioning In Urban Informal Housing In India, Sarita Vijay Panchang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aims of this research were to examine sanitation insecurity in urban informal housing through the lens of the built environment, social disparities, and health implications. While the Millennium Development Goals for halving the global proportion of people without access to safe drinking water were met ahead of schedule, progress fell short for sanitation, creating new objectives for the Sustainable Development Goals to be met in 2030. Much research in the Global South is dedicated to community-level sanitation promotion, but often presumes a rural rather than urban setting. Urban informal housing settings constitute a unique challenge due to the range …

Exploring The Equity Performance Of Bike-Sharing Systems With Disaggregated Data: A Story Of Southern Tampa, Zhiwei Chen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The rising adoption of bike-sharing systems brings significant benefits to individuals and society as a whole. However, whether these benefits are distributed throughout society in a fair manner is still an open question. This study presents a methodological framework for assessing the equity performance of bike-sharing systems, with Coast Bike Share system in southern Tampa as a case study. The framework integrates three different datasets: bike-sharing infrastructure, individual travel itineraries and individual sociodemographic attribute data. With these datasets, we model individual accessibility to activity locations using bike-sharing as the mode of transportation by analyzing the “walking-cycling-walking” process of a bike-sharing …

Making A Case For Equity Planning In Transportation Development: Identifying Indicators And Building A Framework For Hillsborough County, Fl, Dayna J. Lazarus

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The idea that planners should work toward an equitable society has been part of the profession since the 1960s, largely based on the work of planning theorists like Paul Davidoff, Sherry Arnstein and Norman Krumholz. Transportation planning, however, has been slower than other sectors of the profession, such as housing, to embrace equity planning concepts. That has begun to change as concerns about income inequality, environmental justice and climate change have become more salient. This thesis makes the case that in order to improve social equity outcomes, transportation planners must make social equity an explicit goal and add social equity …

Statistical Anomaly Detection And Mitigation Of Cyber Attacks For Intelligent Transportation Systems, Ammar Haydari

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Secure vehicular communication is a critical factor for secure traffic management. Perfect security in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) has solid and efficient intrusion detection systems (IDS). In this paper, we consider false data injection attacks and distributed denial-ofservice attacks (DDoS), especially the stealth low-rate DDoS attacks, targeting the integrity and availability, respectively, in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET). Novel statistical intrusion detection and mitigation techniques are proposed for the considered attacks. The performance of the proposed methods are evaluated using a traffic simulator and a real traffic dataset. Comparisons with the state-of-the-art solutions clearly demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed …

Steady State Hydroplaning Risk Analysis And Evaluation Of Unsteady State Effects, Menna Yassin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Hydroplaning is a major concern on high speed roadways during heavy rainfall events. Hydroplaning tools are widely used by designers to reduce their roadway’s hydroplaning potential, therefore reducing the possibilities of severe crashes. This dissertation presents two methodologies for improving the prediction of hydroplaning potential.

The first phase focused on improving an existing widely used software called PAVDRN. Using multiple datasets from the Florida Department of Transportation, the author filtered the data using specific criteria to leave only truly dynamic hydroplaning crashes. The author then evaluated PAVDRN’s prediction capabilities and assessed its reliability in predicting a hydroplaning crash. Using past …

Routing And Designing Networks For Two Transportation Problems, Liu Su

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Routing and designing are essential for transportation networks. With effective routing and designing policies, transportation networks can work safely and efficiently. There are two transportation problems: hazardous materials (hazmat) transportation and warehouse logistics. This dissertation addresses the routing of networks for both problems. For hazmat transportation, the routing can be regulated via network design. Due to catastrophic consequences of potential accidents in hazmat transportation, a risk-averse approach for routing is necessary. In this dissertation, we consider spectral risk measures, for risk-averse hazmat routing. In addition, we introduce a network design problem to select a set of closed road segments for …

Statistical Analysis Of The Role Of Socio-Demographic And Health Factors In Shared Mobility Related Behaviors And Usage Likelihoods, Natalia M. Barbour

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

New transportation technologies and shared mobility systems have not only disrupted the market but also revolutionized the way mobility is perceived. With such rapidly progressing technology, it is likely that this transformation will continue to happen and the market will evolve further. Private and public sectors have been equally engaged in this process and new policies are being formed to accommodate this growth.

The objective of this dissertation study is to investigate how shared mobility is being perceived and utilized, and how socio-demographic and health factors affect users’ behaviors and usage likelihoods. Questionnaire surveys are designed and distributed to collect …

Increasing The Supply Of The Missing Middle Housing Types In Walkable Urban Core Neighborhoods: Risk, Risk Reduction And Capital, Shrimatee Ojah Maharaj

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is a low supply of the missing middle housing types (MMH) in walkable urban core neighborhoods. That is, a variety of compact low- to mid-rise housing in walkable areas that are accessible to entertainment, recreational and other amenities. The largest demographic, the millennials, followed by the baby boomers, prefer the MMH types. The MMH types is a new name for a variety of compact housing types that existed in traditional neighborhoods in urban areas pre-World War II. However, due to changes in housing preferences after World War II, the requisite land use and zoning changes facilitated larger single-family homes …

A Tall Ship: The Rise Of The International Mercantile Marine, Jeffrey N. Brown

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Between 1890 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, nations on both sides of the Atlantic attempted to gain prestige by building the world's greatest steamships for their merchant marines. In 1901, the United States entered this competition with the advent of J.P. Morgan's International Mercantile Marine, which built on the previous work of shipping magnate Clement Griscom. This project will explore why and how Morgan built his monopoly and the implications and repercussions this project had for both Atlantic shipping and U.S. foreign relations. Moving beyond Morgan the man, it also tells the story of the key …

Development Of A New Piezoelectric-Based Energy Harvesting Pavement System, Lukai Guo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A novel design of a piezoelectric-based energy harvesting pavement system (PZ-EHPS) is introduced in this dissertation work. The design concept of this PZ-EHPS is to transform asphalt layers into a piezoelectric energy harvester to collect dissipated vehicle kinetic energy in a large-scale system, relying on two conductive asphalt layers and one piezoelectric material layer. To verify the feasibility of the above design concept, this dissertation work practically fabricated and tested a series of PZ-EHPS specimens under the loads from a Material Testing System (MTS) in the laboratory, and theoretically analyzed one typical PZ-EHPS specimen via a three-degree-of-freedom electromechanical model and …

Factors Explaining Changes In Household Vehicle Miles Of Travel, Richard Driscoll

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Vehicle miles of travel (VMT) is a key indicator of travel demand in the United States. Since 1995 total VMT and VMT per capita has fluctuated, with notable declines in the late 2000s and accelerated increases in the last 7 years. Since 1995, the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) has tracked the household share of total VMT to shed light on the demographic and behavioral data behind personal vehicle travel. The household share of VMT, while still a majority, has declined every NHTS year since at least 1995. Meanwhile, household VMT has stagnated around 2.25 trillion miles since the 2001 …

Connected Autonomous Vehicles: Capacity Analysis, Trajectory Optimization, And Speed Harmonization, Amir Ghiasi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Emerging connected and autonomous vehicle technologies (CAV) provide an opportunity to improve highway capacity and reduce adverse impacts of stop-and-go traffic. To realize the potential benefits of CAV technologies, this study provides insightful methodological and managerial tools in microscopic and macroscopic traffic scales. In the macroscopic scale, this dissertation proposes an analytical method to formulate highway capacity for a mixed traffic environment where a portion of vehicles are CAVs and the remaining are human-driven vehicles (HVs). The proposed analytical mixed traffic highway capacity model is based on a Markov chain representation of spatial distribution of heterogeneous and stochastic headways. This …

Heavy Vehicle Classification Analysis Using Length-Based Vehicle Count And Speed Data, Eren Yuksel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There is an increasing demand for application of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in order to make highways safer and sustainable. Collecting and analyzing traffic stream data are the most important parameters in transportation engineering in enhancing our understanding of traffic congestion and mobility. Classification of the vehicles using traffic data is one of the most essential parameters for traffic management. Of particular interest are heavy vehicles which impact traffic mobility due to their lack of maneuverability and slower speeds. The impact of heavy vehicles on the traffic stream results in congestion and reduction of road efficiency. In this paper, length-based …

Understanding The Effects Of Demographic And Socio-Economic Factors On Public Transit Ridership Trends, Kurt Lehmann

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Public transit, an important mobility service for many, has incurred ridership decline in the U.S. for the past three years. In 2014, U.S. transit ridership was 10.74 billion unlinked passenger trips. In 2015, total ridership was 1.0 percent fewer, and the 2016 decrease was 2.2 percent from 2015. The consistent abandonment of transit in the U.S. does not seem to be ending. In 2017, ridership predicted from year-to-date data is 2.4 percent less than 2016. Furthermore, per capita ridership has decreased 17 percent since 1980. Both the short-term ridership trend and long-term per capita ridership trend is concerning given the …

Performance Evaluation Of Choice Set Generation Algorithms For Modeling Truck Route Choice: Insights From Large Streams Of Truck-Gps Data, Divyakant Tahlyan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis evaluates truck route choice set generation algorithms and derives guidance on using the algorithms for effective generation of choice sets for modeling truck route choice. Specifically, route choice sets generated from a breadth first search link elimination (BFS-LE) algorithm are evaluated against observed truck routes derived from large streams of GPS traces of a sizeable truck fleet in the Tampa Bay region of Florida. A systematic evaluation approach is presented to arrive at an appropriate combination of spatial aggregation and minimum number of trips to be observed between each origin-destination (OD) location for evaluating algorithm-generated choice sets. The …