Transportation Commons^™

Transit Access Equity In Richmond, Va, Rachel Jordan

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the extent of public transit access equity issues in Richmond, VA. The City of Richmond has an established public transportation network system, and the thesis explores the level of access for urban residents to use existing public transportation services. Technologies and programs have begun to emerge across the United States to help solve transit accessibility challenges. The thesis assesses the level of transit access equity that exists in Richmond and introduces technologies and services that could help improve accessibility and equity. The thesis uses a mixed methods approach that will consist of …

Do Global Cities Make Green Cities? How Global Governance Impacts Transportation In Bogotá And Medellín, Eleanor Jackson

Honors Theses

This thesis examines how global and local governance has combined to deliver effective and sustainable public transportation in cities by comparing Bogotá’s bus rapid transit (BRT) system, TransMilenio, with Medellín’s mass transit system, STIMVA, often referred to as Metro de Medellín. After considering the rationales used to justify local and global authority over climate change, this analysis problematizes the supposed benefits of empowering global and local actors by highlighting the conflicts of interest that plague the elites who mediate the global and the local. In analyzing the global and local interactions, this work draws from extensive literature to highlight three …

Access Points And Weave Lengths For Automated Truck Lanes At Two Closely Spaced Interchanges, Ximena Jauregui

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The increase of traffic on major U.S. roadways has motivated the implementation of new technologies and better management of the transportation infrastructure, including managed lanes on freeways. Dedicated truck lanes, a type of managed lane, are increasingly attracting attention since truck freight is continuously increasing and trucks have greater impact on traffic flow relatively to cars. Truck-only managed lanes allow trucks to travel at their own speeds in an exclusive lane with no passenger vehicles on the way; likewise, vehicles on the main lanes of the freeway will have fewer trucks to travel with.

As truck-only managed lanes are being …

Predicting The U.S. Airline Operating Profitability Using Machine Learning Algorithms, Woojin Choi, Mary B. O’Connor, Dothang Truong

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

With the increasing competition and cost pressures, the U.S. airline industry has explored methods to reduce operating costs and diversify revenue sources for improving financial performance. Understanding the influence of operating revenues and expenses on airline profitability is imperative for the long term growth of the airlines and continued generation of profits.

This study examined the cost and revenue data of the U.S. major airlines from the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics Form 41 reports between 2009 and 2018. Using SAS Enterprise Miner software, researchers used variables representing revenue and expenses from these data to develop and test …

Disparities In Public Charging Infrastructure Deployment And Inequitable Electric Vehicle Ownership Cost Based On Income And Race, Chih-Wei Hsu

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Widespread electric vehicle (EV) adoption will be crucial for achieving decarbonization goals in California. The inclusion of marginalized populations in this process is important and involves challenges related to their physical access to charging infrastructure and economic access to EVs. Public access electric vehicle chargers (PAEVCs) and upfront financial incentives for EVs may help reduce the barriers affecting these populations. In this thesis, a spatial analysis at the census block group level shows that, in California, PAEVC access is lower in areas with below median household incomes and areas with a black and Hispanic majority. The PAEVC access disparities are …

Rethinking Consumer Protection: Escaping Death By Regulation, Thomas L. Tacker

Publications

This book is designed to appeal to anyone who is at all interested in topics related to making life better and safer—for all us consumers. Our current approach to consumer protection is extremely flawed; sometimes costing lives rather than saving them. There are better ways to protect ourselves and the people we love.

Transport 2040: Autonomous Ships: A New Paradigm For Norwegian Shipping : Technology And Transformation, World Maritime University

Reports

The main section of this study summarizes overall trends and provides a global overview about developments in all four modes of transport. However, as highlighted in its main findings, technology and automation evolves in different ways in different contexts and environments. While in some countries, certain conditions may allow a new technology to find its way to the market, in other countries such a facilitating environment may not exist. Another factor identified is that the mechanisms behind the introduction of technology and automation in transport are complex. By highlighting general trends, as was mainly done in the Transport 2040: Automation, …

Transport 2040 : Automation In Airports: Automatic Baggage Handling Systems : Technology And Transformation, World Maritime University

Reports

An efficient baggage-handling system is of critical importance to the aviation industry, especially for major hub airports that handle large volumes of passengers and connecting flights. Huge investments have been made over the years, and baggage handling has been long recognized as one of the most promising areas for airport automation. However, given the considerable degrees of diversity and dynamic nature of the aviation industry, the levels of automation vary across different airports and regions. Even terminals at the same airport may use very different systems. Institutional factors, such as infrastructure ownership, regulations and airport-airline arrangements, all play important roles …

Transport 2040 : Analysis Of Technical Developments In Transport : Maritime, Air, Rail And Road, World Maritime University

Reports

A number of technical and socio-technical factors are driving the development and adoption of automation. The report, Transport 2040: Automation, Technology, Employment – The Future of Work, provided an overview of the most important trends forecasted to affect the global transport sector by 2040. This current report provides additional details of that assessment. The research conducted is guided by a transport-technology analytical model that provides a structure for a systematic review across different modes of transport. This report reviews, in particular, the transportation technology through the lens of transport vehicles (e.g. ships, trucks, trains, aircraft) and the technical infrastructure that …

Transport 2040: Automation, Technology, Employment : The Future Of Work, World Maritime University

Reports

On 15 January 2019, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) and the World Maritime University (WMU) launched a flagship report entitled: “Transport 2040: Automation Technology Employment - the Future of Work”. The forward-looking assessment, produced by WMU, investigates how the global transport industry will change as a result of automation and advanced technologies, forecasting and analyzing trends and developments in the major transport sectors - seaborne, road, rail and aviation - to 2040 with an emphasis on the implications for jobs and employment for transport workers.

Offshore Wind Farms And Maritime Navigational Risks, Syed Raza Ali Mehdi

World Maritime University Ph.D. Dissertations

The offshore wind energy sector (OWE) has experienced significant growth in the last few decades. Since the inception of the very first offshore wind farm (OWF) – Vindeby – in 1991, there have been major improvements in materials, structures, aerodynamics, hydrodynamics technologies, as well as substantial developments in installation, operations, maintenance and decommissioning strategies. These advances have led to a rapid increase in the numbers and sizes of both offshore winds turbines (OWTs) and OWFs, and driven down the cost of OWE generation. With further improvements imminent, and increasing societal popularity, the strong evolution of the OWE sector is predicted …

Life In Hampton Roads Survey Press Release #6: Transportation, Social Science Research Center

Life in Hampton Roads Survey Report

[Introductory paragraph]

Every day, people traverse the eleven bridges and five tunnels in the Hampton Roads area, commuting for work, family, and other activities. The 2019 Life in Hampton Roads survey asked residents of the Hampton Roads area about their commute times and opinions on bridge and tunnels.

Measuring Incremental Sb743 Progress: Accounting For Project Contributions Towards Reducing Vmt Under California's Senate Bill 743, Christopher E. Ferrell

Mineta Transportation Institute

On September 27, 2013, California’s governor signed Senate Bill (SB) 743 into law, in part mandating the transition from a level-of-service-based (LOS) measure of transportation environmental impacts to a vehicle-miles-traveled-based (VMT) one in compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Several California jurisdictions, including San Jose, Pasadena, and San Francisco, have moved quickly to comply with SB 743, so it is no surprise that several of these early-adopter cities have been working hard to develop powerful VMT estimation methods and tools using the most recent research available.

This perspective uses the experiences of an early-adopter city, San Jose, to …

Managing Cyber Risks & Business Exposure In The Surface Transportation Ecosystem, Jacques R. Francoeur

Mineta Transportation Institute

This report focuses on Surface Transportation (ST), both fixed and route-based, and the growing threats to their information technology (IT) infrastructures. As an industry, ST seeks to optimize the movement of people and goods, while ensuring safety and resiliency and minimizing environmental impact. Cyber threats are a powerful medium for those with the political, social, and economic motivations and wherewithal to disrupt and destroy existing ST systems. The ultimate objective is to develop a new paradigm to define, describe, design, and deploy the most effective protection, at the lowest cost, in the shortest time within the limits of available resources. …

Are Wide Streets Negligent?, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

American commercial streets are typically designed to encourage rapid automobile traffic, thus making streets unsafe for pedestrians. In the 2016 case of Turturro v. City of New York, the New York Court of Appeals upheld a jury verdict against a city for failing to slow down such traffic. This article describes Turturro, but shows how limited its holding was: the Turturro court emphasized a city's failure to study traffic calming, so if a city studies its options adequately it can avoid liability even if its policies are unsuccessful.

Routing And Scheduling For A Last-Mile Transportation System, Hai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The last-mile problem concerns the provision of travel services from the nearest public transportation node to a passenger’s home or other destination. We study the operation of an emerging last-mile transportation system (LMTS) with batch demands that result from the arrival of groups of passengers who desire last-mile service at urban metro stations or bus stops. Routes and schedules are determined for a multivehicle fleet of delivery vehicles, with the objective of minimizing passenger waiting time and riding time. An exact mixed-integer programming (MIP) model for LMTS operations is presented first, which is difficult to solve optimally within acceptable computational …

Assessing Delamination Of Concrete Bridge Decks With Aging In Arid Regions Using Nondestructive Testing Methods, Melissa Escalante

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Bridge decks usually experience deterioration at a more rapid pace than other infrastructure components due to the heavy traffic loads and environmental conditions that the deck sustains. Delamination within concrete bridge decks accelerates due to water and deicing salts penetrating the concrete; resulting in the corrosion of reinforcing steel. The corrosion of rebar may result in a fracture parallel to the surface of the concrete structure at the top of the reinforcement layer. The delamination is then subjected to expansion over a large span; risking the overall stability of the structural element. Health monitoring of concrete bridge decks is therefore …

Analysis And Modeling Of Lane Changing Behavior, Matthew Mark Vechione

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Lane changing is one of the most basic activities when driving on freeways or arterials. A lane changing maneuver may be classified, depending on the driver's motivation, as mandatory or discretionary. A mandatory lane change occurs when a driver is trying to move his/her vehicle from its existing lane to the target lane in anticipation of the next turn or to avoid a lane closure downstream. On the contrary, a discretionary lane change occurs when a driver desires a faster speed or wants a greater following distance (i.e., at the driver's own discretion). Researchers have always assumed that drivers have …

Capturing The Built Environment-Travel Interaction For Strategic Planning: Development Of A Multimodal Travel Module For The Regional Strategic Planning Model (Rspm), Liming Wang, Brian Gregor, Huajie Yang, Tara Weidner, Anthony Knudson

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Integrated land use and transportation models have evolved along a spectrum from simple sketch planning models to complex microsimulation models. While each has its niche, they are largely unable to balance the flexibility and realism of microsimulation and the speed and interactivity of simple models. The Regional Strategic Planning Model (RSPM) aims to fill this gap by taking a microsimulation approach while making other simplifications in order to model first-order effects quickly. It enables planners to consider the robustness of prospective policies in the face of future uncertainties by accepting a broad range of inputs and allowing rapid simulations of …

A Framework To Capture Dynamic Traffic Trends From Historical Sensor Data, Carlos Gaviria

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The typical approach of increasing infrastructure to alleviate traffic issues such as congestion is becoming unviable due to limited space, high cost, and associated externalities. Control and management strategies using Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) seek to maximize the use of existent infrastructure. Many ITS strategies, such as the deployment of information, require or benefit from knowledge about traffic patterns and trends. This study proposes a mathematical programming formulation and solution algorithm that considers multiple time intervals for the estimation of network-wide traffic states and calculation of the corresponding transition probabilities. The proposed solution enables the determination of sections of the …