Transportation Commons^™

Nevada Surface Transportation, The Lincy Institute And Brookings Mountain West

Brookings Mountain West Publications

This fact sheet examines how Federal funding is allocated between Nevada counties, while also comparing to other Mountain West states. Elements of major bridge, freeway, and bypass projects in northern and southern Nevada are also compared to show the discrepancies between major infrastructure project funding within the state.

What Do Americans Think About Federal Tax Options To Support Public Transit, Highways, And Local Streets And Roads? Results From Year Four Of A National Survey, Mti Report 12-07, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Hilary Nixon

Mineta Transportation Institute

This report summarizes the results of year four of a national random-digit-dial public opinion poll asking 1,501 respondents if they would support various tax options for raising federal transportation revenues, with a special focus on understanding support for increasing revenues for public transit. Eleven specific tax options tested were variations on raising the federal gas tax rate, creating a new mileage tax, and creating a new federal sales tax. Other questions probed various perceptions related to public transit, including knowledge and opinions about federal taxes to support transit. In addition, the survey collected data on standard sociodemographic factors, travel behavior …

Evaluation Of Smart Phone Weight-Mile Tax Truck Data For Supporting Freight Modeling, Performance Measures And Planning, Katherine E. Bell, Miguel Andres Figliozzi

Student Research Symposium

Oregon is one of the few states that currently charge a commercial truck weight-mile tax (WMT). This research serves to evaluate ancillary applications for a system developed by the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) to simplify WMT collection. The data collection system developed by ODOT – Truck Road Use Electronics (TRUE) - includes a smart phone application with a Global Positioning System (GPS) device and microprocessor. The TRUE data has enormous advantages over commercial truck GPS data used in previous research due to its level of disaggregation and its potential to differentiate between vehicle and commodity types. This research evaluates …

Partners On Campus: Open Access Transportation Research At Purdue University, David Scherer

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

In the third community webinar presentation on regional and community partnerships, David Scherer, the Scholarly Repository Specialist at Purdue University, described how institutional repositories can support community engagement through the rewards of the partnership between Purdue's institutional repository, Purdue e-Pubs, and Indiana's Joint Transportation Research Program (JTRP). The Purdue Libraries and the Purdue University Press have worked to archive and showcase the fruits of over 75 years of strong collaboration between Purdue University and the Indiana Department of Transportation on research that has a significant impact on the safe and efficient operation of transportation systems throughout Indiana, the United States, …

The Land Use And Rapid Transportation Nexus In The Massachusetts Bay, Jennifer Folz

All Theses

ABSTRACT
Throughout the last several decades a growing emphasis has been placed on creating sustainable places through innovative planning practices. Urban designers, researchers, planners, and policy makers have continuously examined the land use transportation nexus in order to develop methods to efficiently guide transit funding to encourage alternate modes of travel.
The United States is in the middle of a paradigm shift in generational behaviors. Baby boomers are downsizing and according to the Urban Land Institute are looking for more location-efficient residences. Similarly, Generation Y's attitudes are focused on living and working in close proximity. They are also waiting longer …

Research And Development Of A Land Use Scenario Modeling Tool, John Gliebe, Hongwei Dong, Josh Frank Roll

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Oregon Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) Transportation Planning and Analysis Unit (TPAU) developed a land use modeling tool called the “Land Use Scenario Developer in R” (LUSDR). LUSDR is a modeling tool, written in the “R” language, that may be used to predict and analyze regional land use changes probabilistically, creating a distribution of possible outcomes. It is designed to be integrated with travel demand modeling programs, making it potentially valuable for analyzing the interaction between transportation and land use when assessing various growth-policy and socioeconomic assumptions. This project is Phase 2 for Research and Development of a Land Use Scenario …

Investigation Of Crashes And Identifying The Best Practices For Setting Up Speed Zones In Towns Along Rural Highways In Nevada, Krishna Prasad Shrestha

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In 2010, 51,664 crashes occurred in Nevada. Only about 9% of those crashes occurred in rural areas of the state. However, if only fatal crashes are considered, 41% of those fatal crashes occurred in rural areas. Generally, speed zones are provided in towns along rural highways to reduce speed-related crashes. However, a guideline is necessary for a consistent procedure to setup speed zones throughout the state. The main objectives of this study are to determine factors associated with crashes and to identify the best practices for setting up speed zones in towns along rural highways.

Eleven towns along rural highways …

Traffic Modeling In Lagrangian Coordinates Using Smartphone Apps, Sergio Contreras

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Traditionally, one of the ways traffic flow has been studied is by using the kinematic wave model. This model is derived in the Eulerian framework by using conservation of the number of vehicles. Recently, the kinematic wave model has been transformed into Lagrangian coordinates. In this framework, the independent variables are unique

vehicles and time. The detailed change in framework, and the properties of the model in the changed framework are reviewed. Numerical results from different traffic cases are explained. Since vehicle trajectory data can be easily collected from smartphones,

a smartphone application is developed for this purpose. This data …

Planning Bicycle Infrastructure Based On The Quickest Or Easiest Route Method, Olena Tokmylenko

All Theses

Current bicycle models assume average speed along the route and among routes and that travel time is proportional to distance. There is no method that determines realistic cycling time based on change in speed due to topography. My research proposes a model for the development of bicycle infrastructure based on reducing travel time and level of difficulty. I identified that topography, human power, and riding speed have strong relationship and developed a bicycle travel time model where speed is a function of human power and topography. I solved the shortest route problem with time impedance where time was computed based …

The Impact Of Airport Service Quality Dimension On Overall Airport Experience And Impression, Redha Widarsyah

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This research examines the relationship between seven airport service dimensions (Access, Services and Facilities, Dining, Shopping, Service Personnel and Security, Environment, and Immigration and Customs) and overall passenger perceptions of service quality. The study used convenience sampling collecting data from a total of 304 travelers who were passengers at four major international airports in the West Coast region of United States - Las Vegas McCarran International, Los Angeles International, San Francisco International, and Seattle-Tacoma International. The data was collected online through Qualtrics with a self-administered questionnaire and it was analyzed using multiple linear regression.

Airport access, environment, dining, and immigration …

Analyzing The Effects Of Transit Network Change On Agency Performance And Riders In A Decentralized, Small-To-Mid-Sized Us Metropolitan Area: A Case Study Of Tallahassee, Florida, Mti Report 12-04, Jeffrey Brown, Tuna Batuhan, Torsha Bhattacharaya, Michal Jaroszynski

Mineta Transportation Institute

On July 11, 2011, StarMetro, the local public transit agency in Tallahassee, Florida, restructured its entire bus network from a downtown-focused radial system to a decentralized, grid-like system that local officials and agency leaders believed would better serve the dispersed local pattern of population and employment. The new, decentralized network is based on radial routes serving the major arterial roads and new crosstown routes linking the outer parts of the city, where population and employment is growing. Local officials and agency staff hoped the change would increase transit’s attractiveness and usefulness to the community. One year after the service restructuring, …

Development Of A Comprehensive Database System For A Highway Safety Engineering And Management, Naveen Veeramisti, Justin Baker, Indira Khanal, Kenny Moupita, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

In simple words, the objective of this study is to develop a comprehensive database system to provide a data for highway safety engineering and management.

Calibration Of Traffic Flow Models, Victor Molano

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

This study proposes a methodology to calibrate microscopic traffic flow simulation models. A Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA) algorithm searches for the set of model parameters that minimizes the difference between actual and simulated values

Modeling Long Term Impacts Of Freeway Traffic Incidents On Travel Time Reliability, Vidhya Kumaresan, Mohamed S. Kaseko

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

The objective of this study is to calibrate models of relationships between Travel Time Reliability measures and incident and traffic characteristics for a given highway segment.

Development Of A Smart Application For Police Crash Reports, Sebastien Bonnet, Victor Molano, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

• Gaining a significant amount of time to help police work
• Developing a User Friendly Interface
• Optimizing the GPS Gaining a significant amount of time to help police work
• Developing a User Friendly Interface
• Optimizing the bar code scan technology
• Application for MC 75 mobile technology

Investigation Of Crashes And Identifying The Best Practices For Setting Up Speed Zones In Towns Along Rural Highways In Nevada, Krishna Shrestha

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

• To determine the factors associated with crashes
• To determine the factors that affect a speed limit
• To identify the best practices used by other state DOTs when setting up
  speed zones in towns along their rural highways
• To provide recommendations for preparing speed-zone guideline in towns
  along the rural highways in Nevada

Effects On Compliance Of A Hawk Signal In Las Vegas, Mukesh Khadka, Naveen Veeramisti, Alexander Paz, Brendan Morris

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

In 2010, 806 crashes involving pedestrians occurred in Nevada; 36 were fatalities and 796 were injuries. Although numerous pedestrian safety countermeasures exist in Las Vegas, NV it was ranked as the 6th most dangerous large metropolitan area in the U.S. So, additional and more effective safety countermeasures were required to reduce pedestrian crashes in Las Vegas. High-intensity Activated crossWalK (HAWK) signal has been identified as a potential mechanism to reduce crashes. This study evaluates the effectiveness of such signal installed at E. Sahara Avenue, Las Vegas. Data was collected from videos captured by two cameras facing eastbound and westbound for …

A Visualization Tool For A Highway Safety Management System, Indira Khanal, Naveen Veeramisti, Justin Baker, Alexander Paz

College of Engineering: Graduate Celebration Programs

• With lot of research, Federal Highway Administration
  has released a highway Safety management System
  software called as SafetyAnalyst (SA)
• SA has a suite of analytical tools to identify and
  manage system-wide safety improvements:
  Network Screening
  Diagnosis and Countermeasure Selection
  Economic Analyses and priority Ranking
  Countermeasure Evaluation
• SA provides a very rudimentary approach to display
  results just in tabular and textual format
• This study proposes a visualization tool that expands
  the output capabilities provided by SafetyAnalyst

Police Injury Crashes And The Intersections Of Policy, Technology, And Culture, Carol Servino

Graduate Research Symposium (2010 - 2017)

Motor vehicle crashes caused the majority fatalities to police officers in the U. S. for more than a decade, yet little is known about factors contributing to injury crashes. This research project required original data collection. A national survey of police chiefs in state, county, and local agencies of all sizes was conducted online in June and July, 2012. Questions focused on various driving policies and practices, including those related to communication technology commonly used in police patrol vehicles. Other questions included hypothetical situations to explore the culture of driving safety in individual police organizations. The majority of chiefs clearly …

Making Transportation Options Possible, Ronald S. Lembke, Dale S. Rogers

Journal of Transportation Management

Transportation options provide the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell transportation capacity at a future date. These options can provide shippers, carriers and logistics companies a significant opportunity to reduce risks and increase capacity flexibility. This paper summarizes some of these benefits, describes a number of issues to be resolved before trading transportation options can become a reality, and presents possible resolutions for these issues.