<p>  </p> <p>For decades, agencies have collected infrastructure condition assessment data using dedicated equipment that require substantial capital investments and staff time to operate/drive. However, these techniques are challenging to scale network wide. The United States has over 8 million lane miles of roadways which generate almost 3 trillion vehicle miles annually.  Connected vehicles can now provide real-time data on a wide range of parameters such as vehicle speed, location, lane markings, and 3 axis acceleration. This dissertation develops techniques to validate, utilize and leverage connected vehicle data for infrastructure assessment and monitoring.  </p> <p><br></p> <p>Opportunities to employ connected vehicle data were examined in the following areas: quality of lane marking edge lines, width of lanes (particularly temporary lanes in construction zones), and pavement roughness. Quality of lane markings was evaluated using embedded lane keep assist data and equipment. In 2020 and 2021 over 5000 miles of pavement markings were evaluated on Indiana interstates. Comparisons between 2020 and 2021 data showed detection increase from 80.2% to 92.3%.  Although there are no industry standards for lane keep assist data, this study demonstrated both the importance and utility of partnering with the automotive industry to develop shared vision on acceptable lane quality. </p> <p><br></p> <p>A follow-up quantitative study was performed using a LiDAR vehicle to compare LiDAR values with those that are obtained from traditional retroreflectivity measurements used for contract acceptance and maintenance decisions. A comparison of LiDAR intensity to retroreflectivity (the industry standard) on 70 miles of US-52 and US-41 in Indiana was assessed and a linear regression found that the intensity values are comparable to retroreflectivity readings with an R2 of 0.87 and 0.63 for right edge and center skip lines respectively. These results suggest that LiDAR is a viable tool for monitoring of retroreflectivity of pavement markings that are strongly correlated with existing standards, but scale much better than traditional retroreflectivity measurement techniques.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The LiDAR data also provided the opportunity to evaluate how well modern vehicles measure lane width. This dissertation reports on over 200 miles of roadway and when compared to LiDAR and field measurements had a root mean square error of 0.24 feet. This data is valuable for agencies to quickly identify system wide where lane widths fall below acceptable design standards, typically 11-feet. </p> <p> </p> <p>The final connected vehicle data set evaluated was pavement roughness and compared with traditional dedicated vehicles collecting international roughness index (IRI) data. The study evaluated a 20-mile segment in 2022, and showed a linear regression between these data sets had an R2 of over 0.7, suggesting that connected vehicle roughness data can be utilized for network level monitoring of pavement quality. Scalability of these techniques is also illustrated with graphics characterizing IRI values obtained from almost 6 million records to evaluate improvements in Indiana construction zones and over 5,800 miles of I-80 in April of 2022 and October 2022.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Although connected vehicle data for infrastructure assessment is still in its infancy, these case studies demonstrate significant opportunities for public agencies to collect selected system wide infrastructure condition in near real-time, and in many cases at a lower cost than traditional techniques. </p>

Asset managers continue to prepare physical infrastructure investments needed to accommodate the emerging technologies, namely vehicle connectivity, electrification, and automation. The provision of new infrastructure and modification of existing infrastructure is expected to incur a significant amount of capital investment. Secondly, with increasing EV and CAV operations, the revenues typically earned from vehicle registrations and fuel tax are expected to change due to changing demand for vehicle ownership and amount of travel, respectively. This research estimated (i) the changes in highway expenditures in an era of ECAV operations, (ii) the net change in highway revenues that can be expected to arise from ECAV operations, and (iii) the changes in user equity across the highway user groups (vehicle classes). In assessing the changes in highway expenditures, the research developed a model to predict the cost of highway infrastructure stewardship based on current and/ or future system usage. <div><br></div><div>The results of the research reveal that CAVs are expected to significantly change the travel patterns, leading to increased system usage which in turn results in increased wear and tear on highway infrastructure. This, with the need for new infrastructure to support and accommodate the new technologies is expected to result in increased highway expenditure. At the same time, CAVs are expected to have significantly improved fuel economy as compared to their human driven counterparts, leading to a decrease in fuel consumption per vehicle, resulting in reduced fuel revenues. Furthermore, the prominence of EVs is expected to exacerbate this problem. This thesis proposed a revision to the current user fee structure to address these impacts. This revision contains two major parts designed to address the system efficiency and equity in the near and long term. For the near term, this thesis recommended a variable tax scheme under which each vehicle class pays a different fuel tax rate. This ensures that both equity and system efficiency are improved during the transition to ECAV. In the long term, this thesis recommended supplementing the fuel tax with a distance based VMT tax, applicable to electric vehicles.<br></div>

<p>  </p> <p>Advancements in technology have propelled the availability of enriched and more frequent information about traffic conditions as well as the external factors that impact traffic such as weather, emergency response etc. Most newer vehicles are equipped with sensors that transmit their data back to the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) at near real-time fidelity. A growing number of such connected vehicles (CV) and the advent of third-party data collectors from various OEMs have made big data for traffic commercially available for use. Agencies maintaining and managing surface transportation are presented with opportunities to leverage such big data for efficiency gains. The focus of this dissertation is enhancing the use of CV data and applications derived from fusing it with other datasets to extract meaningful information that will aid agencies in data driven efficient decision making to improve network wide mobility and safety performance.   </p> <p>One of the primary concerns of CV data for agencies is data sampling, particularly during low-volume overnight hours. An evaluation of over 3 billion CV records in May 2022 in Indiana has shown an overall CV penetration rate of 6.3% on interstates and 5.3% on non-interstate roadways. Fusion of CV traffic speeds with precipitation intensity from NOAA’s High-Resolution Rapid-Refresh (HRRR) data over 42 unique rainy days has shown reduction in the average traffic speed by approximately 8.4% during conditions classified as very heavy rain compared to no rain. </p> <p>Both aggregate analysis and disaggregate analysis performed during this study enables agencies and automobile manufacturers to effectively answer the often-asked question of what rain intensity it takes to begin impacting traffic speeds. Proactive measures such as providing advance warnings that improve the situational awareness of motorists and enhance roadway safety should be considered during very heavy rain periods, wind events, and low daylight conditions.</p> <p>Scalable methodologies that can be used to systematically analyze hard braking and speed data were also developed. This study demonstrated both quantitatively and qualitatively how CV data provides an opportunity for near real-time assessment of work zone operations using metrics such as congestion, location-based speed profiles and hard braking. The availability of data across different states and ease of scalability makes the methodology implementable on a state or national basis for tracking any highway work zone with little to no infrastructure investment. These techniques can provide a nationwide opportunity in assessing the current guidelines and giving feedback in updating the design procedures to improve the consistency and safety of construction work zones on a national level.  </p> <p>CV data was also used to evaluate the impact of queue warning trucks sending digital alerts. Hard-braking events were found to decrease by approximately 80% when queue warning trucks were used to alert motorists of impending queues analyzed from 370 hours of queueing with queue trucks present and 58 hours of queueing without the queue trucks present, thus improving work zone safety. </p> <p>Emerging opportunities to identify and measure traffic shock waves and their forming or recovery speed anywhere across a roadway network are provided due to the ubiquity of the CV data providers. A methodology for identifying different shock waves was presented, and among the various case studies found typical backward forming shock wave speeds ranged from 1.75 to 11.76 mph whereas the backward recovery shock wave speeds were between 5.78 to 16.54 mph. The significance of this is illustrated with a case study of  a secondary crash that suggested  accelerating the clearance by 9 minutes could have prevented the secondary crash incident occurring at the back of the queue. Such capability of identifying and measuring shock wave speeds can be utilized by various stakeholders for traffic management decision-making that provide a holistic perspective on the importance of both on scene risk as well as the risk at the back of the queue. Near real-time estimation of shock waves using CV data can recommend travel time prediction models and serve as input variables to navigation systems to identify alternate route choice opportunities ahead of a driver’s time of arrival.   </p> <p>The overall contribution of this thesis is developing scalable methodologies and evaluation techniques to extract valuable information from CV data that aids agencies in operational decision making.</p>