Transportation Commons^™

Community Benefits And Lessons For Local Engagement In A California Open Streets Event: A Mixed-Methods Assessment Of Viva Callesj 2018, Gordon Douglas, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Mary Currin-Percival, Katherine Cushing, Jason Dehaan

Mineta Transportation Institute

This report presents the findings from an evaluation of the September 2018 Viva CalleSJ open streets event in San José,CA. The research was designed to assess the success of the event, guide planning for future open streets events, and inform potential funders and community partners about the benefits of such events. To gather the impressions of participants, local residents, and workers at businesses along the event route, the mixed-methods study analyzed results from a survey of 1,571participants, 114 interviews with community members and businesses, and participant observations. Researchers also examined social media presence and a related augmented reality gaming component. …

Electronic Wayfinding For Visually Impaired Travelers: Limitations And Opportunities, Martin Swobodzinski, Amy T. Parker

TREC Project Briefs

In this project, we distilled an inventory of smartphone-based electronic travel aid technology for the wayfinding of visually impaired travelers in an urban environment based on a thorough review of software marketplaces and the academic literature. Subsequently, we solicited structured input from domain experts and visually impaired individuals on their experiences and evaluations pertaining to personal telecommunication technology for safe and efficient wayfinding. The insights gained from this project are instrumental for the conceptualization and development of integrated route planning and guidance application that address the distinct information needs and expectations of individuals with a vision-related functional impairment. The very …

Understanding Factors Affecting Arterial Reliability Performance Metrics, Jason C. Anderson, Rohan Sirupa, Sirisha Kothuri, Avinash Unnikrishnan

TREC Final Reports

In recent years, the importance of travel time reliability has become equally important as average travel time. However, the majority focus of travel time research is average travel time or travel time reliability on freeways. In addition, the identification of specific factors (i.e., peak hours, nighttime hours, etc.) and their effects on average travel time and travel time variability are often unknown. The current study addresses these two issues through a travel time-based study on urban arterials. Using travel times collected via Bluetooth data, a series of analyses are conducted to understand factors affecting reliability metrics on urban arterials. Analyses …

Effects Associated With The Deployment Of Autonomous And Connected Vehicles: Insights From Las Vegas, Nv, Sarah Dennis

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Autonomous and connected vehicles (ACVs) are quickly evolving and becoming part of our transportation systems. Adoption of this technology is largely dependent on public perceptions and comfort. The objective of this study was to evaluate public perceptions of ACVs and gain knowledge regarding potential use and important aspects towards acceptance of ACVs. Specifically, the differences in perceptions of people who have ridden an ACV are compared to those who have not. A stated preference approach was utilized, as this is an emerging technology. Two different survey questionnaires were distributed. The first survey was distributed to participants considered to be members …

The War On Winter: How Americans Put Down Roots On The Northern Plains, 1854-1949, Daniel J. Fischer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation is a study of how the United States was able to expand onto the Northern Great Plains, consisting of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and the eastern parts of Wyoming and Montana, between 1854 and 1949 despite the threat to property, comfort, and survival posed by the region’s harsh winters, which brought intense cold, large snowdrifts, and blinding blizzards. This dissertation argues that five tools – government programs, rapidly changing technology, imagination, strong local communities, and toughness – allowed native-born Americans and European immigrants to survive and become increasingly secure in the region. But it also argues that severe gaps …

Enhanced Transit Corridors In Portland's Central City, Gabe Graff, Kelly Betteridge

PSU Transportation Seminars

Over the past two years, the Portland Bureau of Transportation and TriMet have joined forces to identify, design and build capital and operational treatments to help buses move more quickly and reliably through Portland’s increasingly congested Central City. Already the densest concentration of people and jobs in Oregon, Portland’s Central City is growing fast and increasing the speed and reliability of transit is key to achieving our City and region’s transportation, climate and livability goals. Working in partnership on PBOT’s Central City in Motion plan and TriMet and Metro’s Enhanced Transit Corridor program, the two agencies have identified a series …

Minimodal: Dimensional Domain Of Miniature Shipping Containers For Intermodal Freight Transportation, Lee Stapley

Ursidae: The Undergraduate Research Journal at the University of Northern Colorado

This study explores the feasibility of miniature shipping container usage within existing intermodal transportation (IT) supply chains. Smaller intermodal container shipments may help realign freight shipments with the most efficient transportation mode, rail. These containers embolden the dimensional domain (DD) of shipping. The shipping container dimensional domain (container size variation and modal fluidity) is widespread and results in shipments that are often larger or more infrequent than needed. The DD impacts transport mode, shipping frequency, shipment velocity, intermodal supply chain accessibility, and regional shipping networks. This study suggests that container size impacts the DD and, therefore, mode choice. As miniature …

Is There An Economic Case For The Olympic Games?, Chris Dempsey, Victor Matheson

Economics Department Working Papers

The Olympic Games are a major undertaking that promise both large costs and potentially large benefits to host cities. This paper lays out the potential economic benefits of hosting the Olympics and details how, in the vast majority of cases, these gains are unlikely to cover the costs of hosting the event. The ideas are then applied to the experience of Boston in its ultimately unsuccessful bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Leveraging Twitter And Machine Learning For Real-Time Transit Network Evaluation, Xiaoyue Cathy Liu, Qian Zuo, Shenruoyang Na, Ran Wei, Aaron Golub, Liming Wang, Jake Davis

TREC Project Briefs

With today’s profusion of open data sources and real-time feeds, transit agencies have an unparalleled opportunity to leverage large amounts of data to improve transit service. Thanks to NITC researchers, there is now an open-source tool for that.

The new Social-Transportation Analytic Toolbox (STAT) for Transit Networks, developed by researchers at the University of Utah and Portland State University, is a dynamic platform that combines Twitter, general transit feed specification (GTFS), and census transportation planning products (CTPP)—in this case, job density data—to help agencies evaluate overall system performance and identify connectivity gaps. It can also act as a decision support …

Social-Transportation Analytic Toolbox (Stat) For Transit Networks, Xiaoyue Cathy Liu, Qian Zuo, Shenruoyang Na, Ran Wei, Aaron Golub, Liming Wang, Jake Davis

TREC Final Reports

This project builds an open-source, socio-transportation analytic (STAT) toolbox for public transit system planning in an effort to integrate social media and general transit feed specification (GTFS) data for transit agencies in evaluating and enhancing the performance of public transit systems. This toolbox is novel and essential to transit agencies in two aspects. First, it enables the integration, analysis and visualization of two major, new open transportation data, social media and GTFS data, to support transit decision-making. Second, it allows transit agencies to evaluate service network efficiency and access equity of transit systems in a cohesive manner, and identify areas …

Bicycle Planning Gis Tool, Joseph Broach

TREC Final Reports

Although currently only about one percent of US trips are done by bicycle, there is significant geographic variation. Differences across communities, along with much higher cycling rates observed in other places around the world, indicates large potential bicycling demand for daily travel in the US. In response, many communities are developing and implementing bicycle master plans that include a range of bikeway infrastructure aimed at making riding more appealing, including separated paths, protected (or separated) bike lanes, striped bike lanes, bicycle boulevards, sharrows, route signage, and intersection crossing aids. Given limited resources, planners and engineers need tools to estimate the …

Characterizing The Trip Generation Profiles Of Multifamily Housing, Kelly Clifton, Kristina M. Currans

TREC Final Reports

Cities are increasingly wanting to assess the impacts new development has on all modes in the transportation system. Many communities are requiring site-level transportation impact analysis to examine travel outcomes. The historical focus on developing data and methods exclusively for the automobile, such as the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Trip Generation Handbook, has left planners with little guidance for these new challenges. This study aims to examine the limitations in the dominant approaches to understand how they may misguide the planning process for multifamily housing development. Specifically, we aim to examine the vehicle and person trip generation rates associated …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of A School-Based Intervention On Driving-Related Carbon Emissions Using Real-Time Transportation Data, Eugene Cordero, Diana Centeno

Mineta Transportation Institute

The development of tools that can measure the efficiency of individual driving behaviors offers unique opportunities to encourage drivers towards more efficient driving behaviors. As states make progress towards reducing carbon emissions through the adoption of renewable energy for electricity generation, transportation remains the largest sources of carbon emissions. Although numerous local or regional campaigns have encouraged consumers to conserve energy at home and at work, less interest has been shown in encouraging drivers to adopt more energy efficient driving behaviors. In this study, a smartphone application was used to gather driving data (e.g., hard accelerations, hard braking and time …

Model And Analysis Of Labor Supply For Ride-Sharing Platforms In The Presence Of Sample Self-Selection And Endogeneity, Hao Sun, Hai Wang, Zhixi Wan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the popularization of ride-sharing services, drivers working as freelancers on ride-sharing platforms can design their schedules flexibly. They make daily decisions regard- ing whether to participate in work, and if so, how many hours to work. Factors such as hourly income rate affect both the participation decision and working-hour decision, and evaluation of the impacts of hourly income rate on labor supply becomes important. In this paper, we propose an econometric framework with closed-form measures to estimate both the participation elasticity (i.e., extensive margin elasticity) and working-hour elasticity (i.e., intensive margin elasticity) of labor supply. We model the sample …

National Scan Of Bike Share Equity Programs: Approaches And Best Practices For Promoting Equity In Bike Share, Nathan Mcneil, John Macarthur, Joseph Broach, Austin Cummings, Rae-Leigh Stark, Rebecca Sanders, Adrian Witte

TREC Final Reports

As bike share systems around the United States have grown in number and size in recent years, there has been an increasing effort to ensure that those systems are accessible to all residents, particularly those who have the fewest resources or have been underserved in the past. The mobility landscape in 2019 is rapidly changing, with scooter and e-bike systems along with ride-hailing and ride-sharing companies contributing to a new and uncharted urban transportation scene. Meanwhile, bike share is still relatively new and changing quickly. In order to compete and excel in this changing landscape, particularly with regard to providing …

The Impact Of Zev Adoption On California Transportation Revenue, Martin Wachs, Hannah King, Asha Weinstein Agrawal

Mineta Transportation Institute

Former California Governor Jerry Brown set an ambitious target for the state to reach five million zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) by 2030. The policy is intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but progress toward this target will also affect future state-generated transportation revenues collected from vehicle owners and operators. A central concern for policymakers is to estimate the magnitude of the revenue impact. We used a simple spreadsheet model to project future transportation revenue in California through 2040 under two scenarios. The first scenario assumes that ZEV ownership continues at its historical rate of net increase, approximately 26,000 vehicles per year …

Developing Algorithms To Detect Incidents On Freeways From Loop Detector And Vehicle Re-Identification Data, Biraj Adhikari

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A new approach for testing incident detection algorithms has been developed and is presented in this thesis. Two new algorithms were developed and tested taking California #7, which is the most widely used algorithm to date, and SVM (Support Vector Machine), which is considered one of the best performing classifiers, as the baseline for comparisons. Algorithm #B in this study uses data from Vehicle Re-Identification whereas the other three algorithms (California #7, SVM and Algorithm #A) use data from a double loop detector for detection of an incident. A microscopic traffic simulator is used for modeling three types of incident …

Zac: A Zone Path Construction Approach For Effective Real-Time Ridesharing, Meghna Lowalekar, Pradeep Varakantham, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time ridesharing systems such as UberPool, Lyft Line, GrabShare have become hugely popular as they reduce the costs for customers, improve per trip revenue for drivers and reduce traffic on the roads by grouping customers with similar itineraries. The key challenge in these systems is to group the right requests to travel in available vehicles in real-time, so that the objective (e.g., requests served, revenue or delay) is optimized. The most relevant existing work has focussed on generating as many relevant feasible (with respect to available delay for customers) combinations of requests (referred to as trips) as possible in real-time. …

Volumetric Optimization Of Freight Cargo Loading: Case Study Of A Smu Forwarder, Tristan Lim, Michael Ser Chong Ping, Mark Goh, Shi Ying Jacelyn Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Purpose: Freight forwarders faces a challenging environment of high market volatility and margin compression risks. Hence, strategic consideration is given to undertaking capacity management and transport asset ownership to achieve longer term cost leadership. Doing so will also help to address management issues, such as better control of potential transport disruptions, improve scheduling flexibility and efficiency, and provide service level enhancement.Design/methodology/approach: The case company currently hastruck resource which is unprofitable, and the firm’s schedulers are having difficulty optimizing the loading capacity. We apply Genetic Algorithm (GA) to undertake volumetric optimization of truckcapacity and to build an easy-to-use platform to help …

Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach For Lagrangian Control: Improving Freeway Bottleneck Throughput Via Variable Speed Limit, Reza Vatani Nezafat

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Connected vehicles (CVs) will enable new applications to improve traffic flow. The focus of this dissertation is to investigate how reinforcement learning (RL) control for the variable speed limit (VSL) through CVs can be generalized to improve traffic flow at different freeway bottlenecks. Three different bottlenecks are investigated: A sag curve, where the gradient changes from negative to positive values causes a reduction in the roadway capacity and congestion; a lane reduction, where three lanes merge to two lanes and cause congestion, and finally, an on-ramp, where increase in demand on a multilane freeway causes capacity drop. An RL algorithm …