Transportation Commons^™

Vehicular Crowdsourcing For Congestion Support In Smart Cities, Stephan Olariu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Under present-day practices, the vehicles on our roadways and city streets are mere spectators that witness traffic-related events without being able to participate in the mitigation of their effect. This paper lays the theoretical foundations of a framework for harnessing the on-board computational resources in vehicles stuck in urban congestion in order to assist transportation agencies with preventing or dissipating congestion through large-scale signal re-timing. Our framework is called VACCS: Vehicular Crowdsourcing for Congestion Support in Smart Cities. What makes this framework unique is that we suggest that in such situations the vehicles have the potential to cooperate with various …

Smart Parking Systems: Reviewing The Literature, Architecture And Ways Forward, Can Biyik, Zaheer Allam, Gabriele Pieri, Davide Moroni, Muftah O' Fraifer, Eoin O' Connell, Stephan Olariu, Muhammad Khalid

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Internet of Things (IoT) has come of age, and complex solutions can now be implemented seamlessly within urban governance and management frameworks and processes. For cities, growing rates of car ownership are rendering parking availability a challenge and lowering the quality of life through increased carbon emissions. The development of smart parking solutions is thus necessary to reduce the time spent looking for parking and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The principal role of this research paper is to analyze smart parking solutions from a technical perspective, underlining the systems and sensors that are available, as documented in the …

Local Climate Action Planning As A Tool To Harness The Greenhouse Gas Emissions Mitigation And Equity Potential Of Autonomous Vehicles And On-Demand Mobility, Serena Alexander, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Benjamin Y. Clark

Mineta Transportation Institute

This report focuses on how cities can use climate action plans (CAPs) to ensure that on-demand mobility and autonomous vehicles (AVs) help reduce, rather than increase, green-house gas (GHG) emissions and inequitable impacts from the transportation system. We employed a three-pronged research strategy involving: (1) an analysis of the current literature on on-demand mobility and AVs; (2) a systematic content analysis of 23 CAPs and general plans developed by municipalities in California; and (3) a comparison of findings from the literature and content analysis of plans to identify opportunities for GHG emissions reduction and mobility equity.

Findings indicate that maximizing …

Infrastructure Academy Transportation Program, Hassan Hashemian

Mineta Transportation Institute

The College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology at the California State University, Los Angeles has expanded its National Summer Transportation Institute into a year-long program by creating the Infrastructure Academy Transportation Program (IATP). The goal of this program is to build a pipeline of diverse, well qualified young people for the transportation industry. The program works with high school students and teachers to offer academic courses, basic skills, workforce readiness training, internships, extracurricular activities, and career placements to prepare students and place them into the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) College track. The academy emphasizes on transportation as …

Examining Bicycle And Motorized Vehicle Speeds And Their Relationships In The Context Of Urban Roadways, Jaclyn Sue Schaefer

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis presents a compilation of papers exploring passenger car and bicycle speeds through their interactions with each other and with urban roadway factors.

First, following a concern raised in part of the traffic literature that a large mode shift toward bicycling may cause travel time delays and potentially exacerbate congestion instead of alleviate it unless bicycle lanes are installed, an empirical study detailing how the presence of bicycles on urban roads without bicycle lanes may affect passenger car speeds is presented. Pneumatic tube data from six predominantly low speed, low volume roads in Portland, Oregon were utilized to identify …

Implementation Studies Of Fishing Vessel Cape Town Agreement Barriers In China, Kaijie Xie

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Winning The Fight For Better Bus Service, Steven Higashide

PSU Transportation Seminars

The "right to the city" depends on the right to access the city, and U.S. regions are marked by profoundly unequal access. One of the clearest manifestations of this is the state of U.S. bus transit. Bus service is simple to improve and has vast potential to better people's lives, but has been constrained by the racist planning and politics that shape every American city.

How can we fulfill the promise of better buses and create abundant transit networks that expand access to opportunity? In this seminar, Higashide unpacks the elements of effective bus service – and cites examples from …

Enhanced Traffic Incident Analysis With Advanced Machine Learning Algorithms, Zhenyu Wang

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Traffic incident analysis is a crucial task in traffic management centers (TMCs) that typically manage many highways with limited staff and resources. An effective automatic incident analysis approach that can report abnormal events timely and accurately will benefit TMCs in optimizing the use of limited incident response and management resources. During the past decades, significant efforts have been made by researchers towards the development of data-driven approaches for incident analysis. Nevertheless, many developed approaches have shown limited success in the field. This is largely attributed to the long detection time (i.e., waiting for overwhelmed upstream detection stations; meanwhile, downstream stations …

A Parametric Analysis Of A Turbofan Engine With An Auxiliary Bypass Combustion Chamber – The Turboaux Engine, Kaleab Fetahi

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A parametric study of a novel turbofan engine with an auxiliary combustion chamber, nicknamed the TurboAux engine is presented. The TurboAux engine is conceived as an extension of a low-bypass turbofan engine with an auxiliary bypass annular combustion chamber around the core stream. The study presented in this thesis is motivated by the need to facilitate clean secondary burning of fuel at temperatures higher than conventionally realized, from air exiting the low-pressure compressor. The parametric study starts by analyzing the turbojet engine and its performance with and without an afterburner segment attached. Following that, the conventional turbofan and its mixing …

Investing In California’S Transportation Future: Public Opinion On Critical Needs, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Hilary Nixon, Cameron Simmons

Mineta Transportation Institute

In 2017, the State of California adopted landmark legislation to increase the funds available for transportation in the state: Senate Bill 1 (SB1), the Road Repair and Accountability Act of 2017. Through a combination of higher gas and diesel motor fuel taxes, SB1 raises revenue for four critical transportation needs in the state: road maintenance and rehabilitation, relief from congestion, improvements to trade corridors, and improving transit and rail services.

To help state leaders identify the most important projects and programs to fund within those four topical areas, we conducted an online survey that asked a sample of 3,574 adult …

A Two-Stage Parallel Network Dea Model For Analyzing The Operational Capability Of Container Terminals, Jaehun Park, Byung Kwon Lee, Joyce M. W. Low

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study proposes a systematical approach to evaluate the operational capability of container terminals and discusses the effect of resource usages on operational performances. Two inter-dependent processes (i.e. the loading-discharging (L&D) and the delivery-receiving (D&R) operational processes) with shared/non-shared resources and common/separate productions are examined and characterized as a two-stage parallel network. An evaluation model is developed upon the principles of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the operational capability of the terminals. Using the real-world dataset of 9 container terminals at Port of Busan, comparative performance results are obtained for 5 years spanning across 2014–2018. The proposed model demonstrates …

Density Of Demand And The Consumer Benefit From Uber, Matthew H. Shapiro

Research Collection School Of Economics

Uber has attracted the attention of economists and policy makers for its innovations in the taxicab market and its potential for significant consumer welfare gains. The size of this gain depends in part on whether these innovations permit transactions previously costly or infeasible. Using New York City — the largest taxi market in the country — as its context, this paper estimates the level of any technological advantage Uber has over hail taxis in matching to consumers. I combine publicly available transportation data with data scraped from Uber and traffic cameras to estimate a model of the demand for transportation …

Development Of A Statistical Model To Predict Materials’ Unit Prices For Future Maintenance And Rehabilitation In Highway Life Cycle Cost Analysis, Changmo Kim, Ghazan Khan, Brent Nguyen, Emily L. Hoang

Mineta Transportation Institute

The main objectives of this study are to investigate the trends in primary pavement materials’ unit price over time and to develop statistical models and guidelines for using predictive unit prices of pavement materials instead of uniform unit prices in life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) for future maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) projects. Various socio-economic data were collected for the past 20 years (1997–2018) in California, including oil price, population, government expenditure in transportation, vehicle registration, and other key variables, in order to identify factors affecting pavement materials’ unit price. Additionally, the unit price records of the popular pavement materials were …

Toward A Guide For Smart Mobility Corridors: Frameworks And Tools For Measuring, Understanding, And Realizing Transportation Land Use Coordination, Bruce Appleyard, Jonathan Stanton, Chris Allen

Mineta Transportation Institute

The coordination of transportation and land use (also known as “smart growth”) has been a long-standing goal for planning and engineering professionals, but to this day it remains an elusive concept to realize. Leaving us with this central question -- how can we best achieve transportation and land use coordination at the corridor level?

In response, this report provides a review of literature and practice related to sustainability, livability, and equity (SLE) with a focus on corridor-level planning. Using Caltrans’ Corridor Planning Process Guide and Smart Mobility Framework as guideposts, this report also reviews various principles, performance measures, and place …

The Impact Of The Covid-19 Recovery On California Transportation Revenue: A Scenario Analysis Through 2040, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Hannah King, Martin Wachs, Jeremy Marks

Mineta Transportation Institute

The COVID-19 public health emergency has affected every aspect of life in California, reducing social and economic activity. Less activity translates to less travel, and less travel leads to less revenue generated from taxes on motor fuels. As California emerges from the COVID-19 crisis and returns to more normal levels of activity, the state must plan transportation system operations and maintenance in the context of deep uncertainty regarding future revenue.

To help decision makers navigate that uncertainty, we used spreadsheet models to estimate the impacts of different economic recovery scenarios from the COVID-19 pandemic on state-generated transportation revenue. Because it …

Analysis Of High-Speed Rail Operations Using Vissim Simulation To Determine Access Charges And The Impact Of Incidents On A Shared Network, Komal Sree Teja Boyapati

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Shared High-Speed Rail (HSR) networks are networks where two or more railway operators use the same railway network infrastructure for train operations. The train operations in the shared HSR network can be composed of different types of trains operating at different speeds with varying stops at stations in a network. The interactions between different types of trains in the shared HSR network depends on the characteristics of the network’s infrastructure and train operations, and affect the capacity of the network. When a rail operator who owns the infrastructure allows other operators to access its infrastructure, the additional traffic will lead …

Methodologies To Quantify Transit Performance Metrics At The System-Level Using High-Resolution Gps, Stop-Level, And Gtfs Archived Transit Data, Travis Bradley Glick

Dissertations and Theses

Performance metrics have typically focused at two main scales: a microscopic scale that focuses on specific locations, time-periods, and trips; and, a macroscopic scale that averages metrics over longer times, entire routes, and networks. When applied to entire transit systems, microscopic methodologies often have computational limitations while macroscopic methodologies ascribe artificial uniformity to non-uniform analysis areas. These limitations highlight the need for a middle approach.

This dissertation presents a mesoscopic analysis based around timepoint-segments, which are a novel application of an existing system for many transit agencies. For this research, routes are divided into a consecutive group of bus stops …

Racial Disparities In Traffic Enforcement, Mike Dolan Fliss

PSU Transportation Seminars

Law enforcement traffic stops are one of the most common entryways to the US justice system, with significant downstream impacts for both individuals and communities. Group-specific rates are typically based on jurisdiction resident populations; these rates, like many justice-system indicators, demonstrate race-ethnicity disparities. Residential-based rates implicitly assume race-ethnicity groups have equal vehicle access, equal driving volume, and that all driving occurs in resident’s jurisdictions. In contrast, surveys suggest Black non-Hispanic and Hispanic households have less access and drive less than white non-Hispanic households. Models incorporating US Census data and race-ethnicity driving factors from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey showed …

Curating Equitable Transportation, Nikotris Perkins

PSU Transportation Seminars

Getting people and goods from here to there is central to the ways we live, work, and play in the United States. The transportation networks we create as planners, engineers, geologists, contractors, consultants, advocates, and citizens involve a multitude of decisions. These decisions have great impact on who can get where, when and how; often connected to our structures of social power. This seminar connects those dots, questions our ability to make change, and calls participants to be actively involved in a transportation system that is curated for those it targets: everyone.

Webinar: Bus Stops: Access And Equity, Keith Bartholomew

TREC Webinar Series

Improving bus stops by providing shelters, seating, signage, and sidewalks is relatively inexpensive and popular among riders and local officials. Making such improvements, however, is not often a priority for U.S. transit providers because of competing demands for capital funds and a perception that amenities are not tied to measurable increases in system effectiveness or efficiency. This webinar focuses on the role that bus stops play as the point of first contact between transit agencies and their potential riders, and how the quality of that contact can influence both ridership and accessibility for riders with mobility-related disabilities. The webinar will …