Publications

Summary:
Common-carrier parcel lockers present a solution for decreasing delivery times, traffic congestion, and emissions in dense urban areas through consolidation of deliveries. Multi-story residential buildings with large numbers of residents, and thus a high volume of online package orders, are one of the best venues for installing parcel lockers. But what is the right size for a residential building locker that would suit the residents’ and building managers’ needs?

Summary:
A growing body of research looks specifically at freight vehicle parking choices for purposes of deliveries to street retail, and choice impacts on travel time/uncertainty, congestion, and emissions. However, little attention was given to large urban freight traffic generators, e.g., shopping malls and commercial buildings with offices and retail. These pose different challenges to manage freight vehicle parking demand, due to the limited parking options.

Summary:
The central research question for this project explores the distributional impacts of ecommerce and its implications for equity and justice. The research aims to investigate how commercial land use affects people and communities. In 2018, U.S. warehouses surpassed office buildings as the primary form of commercial and industrial land use, now accounting for 18 billion square feet of floor space.

Summary:
In this research we consider an approach for improving the efficiency and tightness of column generation (CG) methods for solving vehicle routing problems. This work builds upon recent work on Local Area (LA) routes. LA routes rely on pre-computing (prior to any call to pricing during CG) the lowest cost elementary sub-route (called an LA arc) for each tuple consisting of the following: (1) a customer to begin the LA arc, (2) a customer to end the LA arc, which...

Summary:
Parking cruising is a well-known phenomenon in passenger transportation, and a significant source of congestion and pollution in urban areas. While urban commercial vehicles are known to travel longer distances and to stop more frequently than passenger vehicles, little is known about their parking cruising behavior, nor how parking infrastructure affects such behavior.

Summary:
Inhabited islands are susceptible to natural hazards, such as wildfires. To avoid disasters, preventative measures and guidelines need to be in place to strengthen community resilience. If these fail, evacuation is often the only choice. However, island evacuation is a vastly understudied problem in both research and practice, particularly for islands without permanent road connections to the mainland that require marine evacuation.

Summary:
Green loading zones (GLZs) are curb spaces dedicated to the use of electric or alternative fuel (“green”) delivery vehicles. Some US cities have begun piloting GLZs to incentivize companies to purchase and operate more green vehicles. However, there are several questions to be answered prior to a GLZ implementation, including siting, potential users, and their willing to pay.

Summary:
This three-year project supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Vehicle Technologies Office has the potential to radically improve the urban freight system in ways that help both the public and private sectors.

Summary:
We utilize an unsupervised learning algorithm called-modes clustering (Huang 1998), which is similar to the better-known-means method (Hartigan and Wong 1979), but with a dissimilarity measure designed for categorical variables (Cao et al. 2012), originally developed for analyzing sequential categorical data such as gene sequences (Goodall 1966), but also amenable to curb zoning types.

Summary:
At the time we are writing this article, hundreds of thousands of delivery vehicles are getting ready to hit the road and travel across U.S. cities to meet the highest peak of demand for ecommerce deliveries during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the Christmas holiday season. This mammoth fleet will not only add vehicle miles traveled through urban centers but also increase parking congestion, battling with other vehicles for available curb space.

Summary:
The Norwegian Public Roads Administration, the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, and SINTEF conducted a field test with a unmanned aerial system (UAS) with various instruments at the research station Fonnbu in Stryn. The purpose of the test was to evaluate the use of instrumented drones for monitoring and assessing avalanche danger. The instruments tested included optical and thermal imaging, laser scanning and ground-penetrating radar.

Summary:
The rapid rise of on-demand transportation and e-commerce goods deliveries, as well as increased cycling rates and transit use, are increasing demand for curb space. This demand has resulted in competition among modes, failed goods deliveries, roadway and curbside congestion, and illegal parking. This research increases our understanding of existing curb usage and provides new solutions to officials, planners, and engineers responsible for managing this scarce resource in the future.

Summary:
Moving freight is vital to our ability to live in cities and access goods — but who bears the costs of moving goods, and who benefits from the access that goods movement provides? These costs and benefits have not been borne equally. The last blog post revealed how urban freight is largely missing in discussions around transportation equity and accessibility. Freight delivers immense benefits to cities and residents.

Summary:
This paper presents a method for extracting transit performance metrics from a General Transit Feed Specification’s Real-Time (GTFS-RT) component and aggregating them to roadway segments. A framework is then used to analyze this data in terms of consistent, predictable delays (systematic delays) and random variation on a segment-by-segment basis (stochastic delays). All methods and datasets used are generalizable to transit systems which report vehicle locations in terms of GTFS-RT parameters.

Summary:
Fundamental diagrams describe the relationship between speed, flow, and density for some roadway (or set of roadway) configuration(s). These diagrams typically do not reflect, however, information on how speed-flow relationships change as a function of exogenous variables such as curb configuration, weather or other exogenous, contextual information.