Transportation Commons^™

The Future Of Transit, Adam Cohen

Mineta Transportation Institute

Public transit agencies are adapting to a post-pandemic operating environment characterized by hybrid work, more dispersed travel demand, workforce constraints, and persistent fiscal pressures. This perspective paper examines how transit agencies, such as the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), can strengthen ridership while improving the financial sustainability and long-term resilience of its transit system. The analysis synthesizes peer-reviewed research, government and industry reports, publicly available data, transit agency case studies, and expert interviews with thought leaders. The findings indicate that reliability, travel time, frequency, and customer experience remain fundamental drivers of transit use, but that traditional peak-oriented service planning …

Identification Of At-Risk Rail Network Segments And Development Of Fragility-Based Resilience Metrics, Haizhong Wang, Brian M. Staes, Benyamin Ghoreishi

Mineta Transportation Institute

This report presents a multi-hazard risk and resilience assessment of the U.S. rail network. The research identifies at-risk rail segments exposed to flash flooding, riverine flooding, extreme heat, and landslides using historical hazard records, federal accident and incident data, and meteorological datasets spanning 2000–2024. Flood exposure is mapped nationally by linking storm records to rail alignments and estimating the frequency and intensity of events at the segment level. For extreme heat, a fragility analysis of 153 documented thermal buckling derailments reveals that a significant share of failures occurred under relatively mild environmental conditions, pointing to infrastructure and maintenance factors rather …

Multimodal Solutions For The Detection Of Safety-Related Railroad Objects Under Adverse Weather: Architectures, Proof-Of-Concepts, And Performance Results, Hayder Radha

Mineta Transportation Institute

The emergence of high-resolution automotive grade lidar sensor technologies and the development of advanced deep- learning frameworks open the door for accurate and real-time perception of the surroundings of mobile trains for improved safety and operational efficiency. Under this project, we developed key components and proof-of-concepts of lidar-based multimodal solutions that rely on advanced deep- learning methods and utilize object detection approaches to demonstrate the feasibility of real-time detection of objects and events that could represent major safety issues for moving trains. The detected objects could be vehicles or people trespassing a railroad track, or they could be hazardous objects …

From Disaster To Resilience: Developing Smart Settlements In The Himalayas, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

Nepal’s catastrophic 26 August 2026 Bhote Koshi–Trishuli flood should be understood not only as a humanitarian tragedy but also as a potentially major turning point in updating national settlement and reconstruction policy. Engineers and scientists have described the floods as a glacier–bedrock collapse that triggered an ice-rock avalanche and debris flow. As per the live updates on September 7, 2026, the total death toll was 1,355, and 4,996 people were missing (The Hindu, 2026). Indian and Nepali rescuers worked urgently to locate and rescue people buried under hydropower tunnels, buildings, mud, and landslide debris.

UN News reported on September 3, …

Studying Extreme Weather Event Impacts For Transit-Reliant Unhoused Populations, Costanza Rampini, Serena Alexander, Jeff Wootton, Amruta Ashish Gandhi

Mineta Transportation Institute

No abstract provided.

Dynamic Flood Risk Assessment For Transportation Infrastructure In Fresno, Ca, Yushin Ahn, Fayzul Pasha

Mineta Transportation Institute

Urban roadway flooding in flat metropolitan environments often shows up as small areas of standing water rather than large, flowing floods. In low-gradient urban environments, subtle micro-topographic features—such as pavement crowns, curbs, and localized depressions—often control where surface water accumulates following rainfall. Accurately identifying these localized ponding areas is important for roadway flood screening and infrastructure management. This study develops a LiDAR-based depression mapping framework to identify roadway segments susceptible to surface ponding in flat urban environments. High-resolution airborne LiDAR datasets were used to generate detailed elevation maps (down to less than a foot in resolution) from ground-classified point clouds …

Advancing Clean Mobility: Hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Bus Workforce Development For Transit Agencies, Manideep Tummalapudi, Shantanu Kumar, Jaskaran Singh

Mineta Transportation Institute

Hydrogen fuel cell electric buses (FCEBs) are rapidly transforming public transportation in the United States. However, while transit agencies are investing heavily in new zero-emission vehicles and fueling infrastructure, far less attention has been paid to the workforce needed to operate and maintain them. As agencies accelerate toward ambitious climate and fleet transition goals, they are also confronting a critical challenge: preparing workers for an entirely new set of technologies, safety requirements, and operational demands. This study addresses that gap by systematically identifying the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) required for FCEB vehicle operators and maintenance technicians, assessing current training …

Why Are Motorcyclist Fatalities Increasing?, Caroline Deck, Ana Cruz Beltrami, Riley Curran, Crystal Cutler

Discovery Day - Daytona Beach

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, from 2019 to 2023 there was a 26% increase of motorcycle crash deaths. In 2023, motorcycle crashes accounted for 15.5% of all crash fatalities in the United States, despite accounting for 3% of registered vehicles. This literature review investigates the contributing factors to the increasing motorcycle fatality rates. In this review, rider characteristics, vehicle factors, roadway environments, and policy are examined for contributions to increased risk. Previous literature has primarily focused on behavioral and demographic factors when investigating this problem. However, evidence suggests that the conditions affecting crash severity and survivability have …

Functionality Risk Assessment And Risk-Based Management For Critical Infrastructure Systems, Anteneh Zewdu Deriba

Dissertations and Theses

Critical infrastructure systems such as transportation networks serve as the lifelines of modern society, supporting economic activity and ensuring access to critical services. Their disruption under extreme events can produce consequences extending far beyond physical damage to individual assets. In transportation networks for instance, failures of critical assets such as bridges and tunnels can reduce accessibility of communities, limit freight capabilities for commerce, and increase travel distance and travel time of road users. These consequences associated with the system functionality loss are tied not only to the physical vulnerability and failure of individual assets, but also to the system configuration …

Mountain Development In Nepal: Settlements, Infrastructure, And Economic Transformation, Keshav Bhattarai, Ambika P. Adhikari

Himalayan Research Papers Archive

As Nepal urbanizes, expands infrastructure, strengthens local governments, and explores deeper connectivity with India and China, climate change is increasing floods, landslides, heat, and water insecurity. Rapid internal migration, rising disaster risks, youth outmigration, and dependence on remittances are also revealing the limits of conventional urban development, especially in the mountainous region. The central challenge for Nepal is no longer just to accommodate growing towns and cities, but to build settlements that are safe, productive, environmentally resilient, and capable of sustaining long-term prosperity.

This paper argues that Nepal's urban future must be guided by a new development paradigm centered on …

Enhancing Wildfire Resilience In The Rail Industry: Developing A Community Resilience Extreme Events Portal (Creep), Karl Kim, Eric Yamashita, Daniele Spirandeli, David Rother, Chris Chiesa, Greg Hampe, Michele Toner

Mineta Transportation Institute

The Community Resilience Extreme Events Portal (CREEP) provides a centralized platform for accessing wildfire danger indices, critical asset locations, and vulnerability scores for rail segments. The project team developed a data-driven, indicator-based vulnerability assessment framework that defines vulnerability as a function of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. To build this framework, the team selected publicly available datasets, prioritizing national datasets whenever possible to ensure transparency, reproducibility, and scalability. The portal allows users to analyze and visualize vulnerability across 1-kilometer segments of Class I freight and passenger rail lines in California, supporting planning and mitigation prioritization to help reduce rail-related fatalities, …

Wildfire Risk & Preparedness For Urban Rail Operators Supporting Large Stadium Events, Karl Kim, Eric Yamashita, Daniele Spirandeli, David Rother

Mineta Transportation Institute

The project team, in collaboration with partners and stakeholders, developed a four-hour training course designed to build a foundational understanding of how wildfire hazards affect rail systems infrastructure operations and how this knowledge can help equip urban rail operators with tools and best practices for proactive risk management. Led by the University of Hawaiʻi and the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center, in partnership with Haley & Aldrich, Inc., this technical report presents an overview of the four modules and scenario planning exercise that together make up the four-hour Wildfire Risk & Preparedness for Urban Rail Operators Supporting Large Stadium Events …

The Relationship Between Maintenance And Overhaul Employee Spending, Business Model, Geographic Region, And The Financial Performance Of Commercial Airlines, Naumaan Khalid Sheikh

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

After nearly 5 decades of deregulation, commercial airline leaders still lack the capability to improve financial performance by structuring their maintenance operations to gain competitive advantages in highly competitive global markets. Without an effective strategy, airline maintenance affects service and financial performance. Framed with Porter’s competitive advantage theory, this quantitative nonexperimental correlational project was to examine the relationships between airline in-house maintenance and overhaul employee spending, business model, geographic region, and financial performance of global commercial full-service carrier (FSC) and low-cost carrier (LCC) airlines. Longitudinal panel data were collected from 121 LCCs and FSCs operating from 2001 to 2019 in …

Automated Battery Management Systems For Electric Vehicles, Woonki Na, Yuanyuan Xie

Mineta Transportation Institute

Electric vehicle (EV) safety, efficiency, and lifetime are strongly influenced by how well battery cells are managed, and as EV adoption accelerates, improving battery performance has become critical to vehicle reliability, cost, and public trust. This report conducts a field study on the core technologies and challenges in Battery Management Systems (BMS), focusing on the classification of BMS circuit topologies (design/structures) and systematically reviewing different topologies of active cell balancing circuits (systems that move energy from stronger battery cells to weaker ones). The study provides a detailed analysis of the working principles, advantages, and disadvantages of various active balancing circuit …

The Use Of Foamed Glass Aggregate (Fga) As A Lightweight Fill Above Culverts, Amr Morsy

Mineta Transportation Institute

Transportation infrastructure—including buried utilities, drainage systems, and culverts—is frequently subjected to significant external stresses arising from existing conditions and new construction, especially in urban environments where deformation and failures can lead to significant operational and safety consequences. Lightweight fills offer a viable strategy to mitigate these stresses by reducing imposed loads. This study investigates the use of lightweight fills, specifically Foamed Glass Aggregate (FGA), as a sustainable solution to support California Senate Bill 1 (SB1) efforts to repair and maintain culverts, as well as for new construction applications. A numerical investigation was conducted to evaluate the performance of culverts backfilled …

Mind The Gap: Freight And Rail System Resilience Between Planning And Practice A Synthesis Of Freight Plan Best Practices And Survey Results From U.S. Transportation Professionals, Serena Alexander, Carmella Uwineza

Mineta Transportation Institute

Freight and rail networks across the United States face mounting risks from weather-related hazards and other systemic disruptions that threaten operational continuity, economic stability, and community well-being. While state freight plans are federally mandated, local and metropolitan freight planning varies widely, leaving gaps in how resilience is addressed across scales. This study examines how resilience is being integrated into freight and rail planning through a two-part approach: (1) a content analysis of 43 recent state and metropolitan freight plans, and (2) a nationwide survey of 56 transportation professionals engaged in freight and rail planning. Findings show broad consensus on the …

Definitions And Mathematical Models Of Op Variants, Pieter Vansteenwegen, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We have described the basic orienteering problem (OP) in Chap. 2, as one known variant of the single vehicle routing problems with profits (VRPP). In this chapter, we introduce the best-known variants of the OP. The first one is the team orienteering problem (TOP). In the TOP multiple routes can be composed to visit a subset of customers. In the context of the game of orienteering, the TOP corresponds to several players of the same team, each collecting profits in parallel, during the same time span. Another well-known variant of the basic OP is the OP with time windows (OPTW), …

Smart-Twin: Systematic Modeling And Real-Time Transportation With Digital Twins, Hovannes Kulhandjian

Mineta Transportation Institute

Urban transportation networks are increasingly affected by everyday congestion, non-recurring disruptions, and limited real-time visibility into what is happening on the road. Transportation agencies require advanced tools that support faster, proactive management and data-driven infrastructure decisions rather than passive monitoring. This report presents SMART-TWIN, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)–driven Digital Twin framework designed for real-time traffic operations, disruption detection, and performance-based decision-making support. The SMART-TWIN architecture integrates microscopic traffic simulation (detailed traffic modeling), long-horizon synthetic demand generation simulating real travel patterns, supervised machine learning, and performance analysis within a unified and reproducible workflow. A corridor-scale Digital Twin was developed for the …

Preparing Today’S Workforce For Tomorrow’S Autonomous Transportation: Bridging Electrical And Civil Engineering Disciplines, Masoud Ghodrat Abadi, Rohollah Moghadam

Mineta Transportation Institute

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are expected to transform transportation systems and reshape workforce needs across engineering and related fields. Although existing AV workforce development efforts often emphasize electrical engineering, computer science, and mechanical engineering, transportation engineering remains underrepresented despite its importance to infrastructure, traffic operations, safety, and mobility integration. This study addresses that gap through the development, implementation, and evaluation of an interdisciplinary certificate program, Workforce for Autonomous Vehicle Engineering (WAVE), at California State University, Sacramento. The program was designed to bridge transportation engineering and electrical engineering through a two-step curriculum model consisting of theoretical educational modules and hands-on laboratory activities. …

Mitigating Negative Consequences Of New Urban Growth In Disadvantaged Communities, Shishir Mathur, Christopher E. Ferrell, Cindy Adrian

Mineta Transportation Institute

New housing and development in California are often planned in communities that already face economic hardship, environmental burdens, and limited access to reliable transportation. Recent research finds specifically that in the San Francisco (S.F.) Bay Area and Southern California (SoCal) metropolitan regions, there is a high propensity to plan new urban development in socially, economically, and environmentally disadvantaged communities (DACs) with poor transit accessibility and limited personal mobility. This project first reviews the literature to identify potential unintended negative impacts of high concentrations of new urban growth in DACs across social, economic, educational, environmental, and transportation dimensions. It then identifies …