Publications

Summary:
The rapid expansion of ecommerce has flooded American cities with delivery trucks, just as those cities are experiencing booming population growth. Retailers need a more efficient, reliable, and cost-effective way to deliver goods in increasingly crowded urban environments. For their part, cities like Seattle want to minimize traffic congestion, both sustain quality of life for residents and ensure a smooth flow of goods and services.

Summary:
Freight vehicle parking facilities at large urban freight traffic generators, such as urban retail malls, are often characterized by a high volume of vehicle arrivals and a poor parking supply infrastructure. Recurrent congestion of freight parking facilities generates environmental (e.g. pollution), economic (e.g. delays in deliveries), and freight and social (e.g. traffic) negative externalities.

Summary:
The Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) completed an evaluation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems’ (UAS) ability to operate in winter weather and in mountainous terrain in support of snow avalanche monitoring. Vendors flew nine multi-rotor, rotary-wing, and fixed wing aircraft on four increasingly difficult missions ranging from flights over a nearby road and bridge to a 2.3 kilometer flight to a 1300 meter mountain to inspect avalanche features.

Summary:
The demand for truck transportation increases alongside growth in population and economic activity. As both truck and passenger traffic outstrip roadway capacity, the result is congestion, which the freight community experiences as truck bottlenecks. This NCHRP project produced a Guidebook that provides state-of-the-practice information to transportation professionals on practices and measures for identifying, classifying, evaluating, and mitigating truck freight bottlenecks.

Summary:
Pickup and delivery operations are an essential part of urban goods movements. However, rapid urban growth, increasing demand, and higher customer expectations have amplified the challenges of urban freight movement. In recent years, the industry has emphasized improving last-mile operations with the intent of focusing on what has been described as the last leg of the supply chain.

Summary:
This research report investigates the relationship between pedestrians and bicyclists on paths parallel to railroad tracks and with a road perpendicular to the path. The possible conflicts at intersections within these design parameters are of concern to ODOT, and therefore, has been recognized as an opportunity to conduct research that improves this type of intersection.

Summary:
Community resilience depends on the resilience of the lifeline infrastructure and the performance of the disaster-related functions of local governments. State and federal resilience plans and guidelines acknowledge the importance of the transportation system as a critical lifeline in planning for community resilience and in helping local governments to set recovery goals.

Summary:
In recent years the focus on and prioritization of the notion of local food, food access and sustainability has been increasing throughout the U.S., especially in urban areas. The rising demand and growing preference for local produce in turn leads to changes in how we transport food. The supply chains found in urban areas are already complicated and costly, and as demand changes this poses a challenge if the local food movement is to be accommodated in our cities. A...

Summary:
This report provides a guidebook for conducting benefit-cost analyses of proposed infrastructure investments on multimodal, multi-jurisdictional freight corridors for public and private decision-makers and other stakeholders at local, state, regional, and national levels to arrive at more informed investment decisions.

Summary:
Freight Performance Measures (FPM) are of interest to transportation planning agencies. One of the key tools that aids in the study of freight system activity is the data from Global Positioning System (GPS) devices located in trucks and cars. While commercially available GPS data has a common basic output format, the level of aggregation of the raw data, impacts the data’s ultimate usability and applications.

Summary:
The outer coast of Washington State is exposed to significant seismic and tsunami hazards. A Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) event is expected to cause high earthquake intensities and tsunami inundation resulting in considerable infrastructure loss, inundation of developed land, and degraded functioning of coastal communities. One area of particular concern is Pacific County, located in southwest Washington, where over 85% of the population is expected to experience severe shaking intensities.

Summary:
Research has established a potential to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by replacing passenger travel for shopping with delivery service, and a few studies have indicated CO2 emissions can also be reduced. However, that research has mostly focused on urban locations and has not addressed criteria pollutants.

Summary:
The safety effects of cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) are mostly unknown and associated with uncertainties, because these systems represent emerging technology. This study proposes a bowtie analysis as a conceptual framework for evaluating the safety effect of cooperative intelligent transport systems. These seek to prevent road traffic accidents or mitigate their consequences.