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Posts Tagged ‘National Academies’

Renewing the National Commitment to the Interstate Highway System

Monday, January 14th, 2019
Figure 1-1: Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower

The Interstate Highway System’s future is threatened by a persistent and growing backlog of physical and operational deficiencies and by a number of large and looming challenges. Most of its segments are decades old, subject to much heavier traffic than anticipated, and operating well beyond their design life without having undergone major upgrades or reconstruction.

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Livable Transit Corridors: Methods, Metrics, and Strategies

Thursday, September 22nd, 2016
Figure 1. Transit corridor livability visioning and improvement process steps

While livability has received increasing attention in planning and policy circles recently, agreement as to how to define, measure, and create it has been elusive. This is especially true in terms of the livability benefits of transit investments. While livability definitions tend to boil livability down to serving diverse people with diverse opportunities (RITA Office of Research, Development, and Technology 2011), most have not been specific enough to measure it consistently and implement it effectively. Furthermore, getting specific about livability—particularly when focusing on the livability benefits of transit-supportive investments—may cause those who do not care for transit to dismiss it.

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Water Efficiency Management Strategies for Airports

Tuesday, June 7th, 2016
Exhibit 1. Types of facilities and end uses.

AIRPORT COOPERATIVE RESEARCH PROGRAM
As major consumers of water, airports have an obligation to be responsible environmental stewards in the community by increasing the efficiency of their water use and decreasing the amount of energy they spend to heat and pump that water. These changes can lower airports’ costs, improving the financial as well as the environmental sustainability of their operations.

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Grand Challenges for Engineering: Imperatives, Prospects, and Priorities

Monday, May 2nd, 2016
 Wesley Harris

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING
Robert Socolow observed that the 14 Grand Challenges fall into four categories. The first is sustainability—maintaining air and water quality, protecting freshwater quantity, preventing sea level rise, keeping forests and other ecosystems in good condition, and minimizing artificially triggered climate change. Next is personal and community health, because, he pointed out, “as individuals we can live fulfilling lives only if we are healthy.” But, he added, “people have a record of being dangerous to each other,” hence the third category, vulnerability and security.

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Interregional Travel: A New Perspective for Policy Making

Wednesday, January 13th, 2016
FIGURE 2-1 Factors contributing to increases in long-distance person miles of travel (PMT), 1977–1995. (Derived from Pisarski 2013.)

TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD
This study reviews the demand for interregional travel in the United States and the uncertainties that arise in supplying transportation services and infrastructure to accommodate it. Consideration is given to relevant experience in other countries, especially in providing intercity passenger rail. A central finding is that appropriate analytical tools and up-to-date data on long-distance travel in the United States are lacking, which complicates decisions about how to invest in the country’s interregional corridors in ways that will serve future travelers most effectively and further other policy goals such as protecting the environment, enhancing safety, and curbing energy use.

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Public Perception of Mileage-Based User Fees

Monday, December 28th, 2015
Figure 1: Support for MBUF by Polling Year. Note: Sample size = 28. Five questions on general support for MBUFs are excluded from this figure because the poll extended over multiple years or the information on the year the poll occurred was unavailable.

TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD
In recent years, the real value of fuel tax revenues has declined significantly as a result of increasing vehicle fuel efficiency, failure to adjust tax rates to keep up with inflation, and fewer miles driven. This decline in the purchasing power of the revenues collected has led to ongoing funding challenges for transportation infrastructure and increased uncertainty about future funding options. The long term sustainability of motor fuel taxes has come into question, in view of increasing fuel efficiency and possible shifts to alternative fuel vehicles. Interest has grown in the potential of replacing the current fuel tax — assessed at the federal level and in many states as a flat fee per gallon — with new road usage charge assessed on all miles traveled. This method is often referred to as a mileage-based user fee (MBUF), road usage charge (RUC), vehicle miles traveled (VMT) fee, or per-mile tax.

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Between Public and Private Mobility: Examining the Rise of Technology-Enabled Transportation Services

Monday, December 14th, 2015
TABLE 2-1 Selected Taxonomy of Innovative Mobility Services

TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD
Information and communication technologies, combined with smartphone applications and location data from global positioning systems, are making feasible transportation services that have long been imagined but never realized on a large scale. These innovations include carsharing; bikesharing; microtransit services; and, most notably, transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft.

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Scenario Planning for Freight Transportation Infrastructure Investment

Thursday, August 27th, 2015
Figure 7. Stress Map of the United States from participants’ sample form (back)

TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD
The future rarely moves in predictable, incremental ways. Often seemingly small changes in technology, demographics, regulations, economics, or a myriad of other factors have dramatic and unintended impacts on how any organization (public or private) plans and operates. These nonlinear impacts are very difficult to predict using traditional forecasting methods and techniques since they, by definition, do not follow any historical patterns.

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Using Web-Based Rider Feedback to Improve Public Transit

Friday, June 5th, 2015

TRANSIT COOPERATIVE RESEARCH PROGRAM
While some transit agencies are comfortable dealing with large volumes of information from multiple social media platforms, online surveys, crowdsourcing, and specialized applications, others are just starting to engage with customers through Twitter. There is a concern in the transit industry about the disparity of knowledge and experience with web-based feedback tools. Therefore, this report is designed to enhance and expand the use of web-based feedback to improve service by agencies at all levels of experience.

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Indirect Benefits of State Investment in Public Transportation

Thursday, April 9th, 2015
Figure 1 Direct and indirect benefits of public transit investments.

NATIONAL COOPERATIVE HIGHWAY RESEARCH PROGRAM
An additional, indirect impact that has seen less consideration in transit program and project planning is the potential cost savings to other government programs that result from the benefits provided by transit. These indirect benefits can result from improved access to jobs, health care, and education, which can reduce the demand for government services.

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