The subject of this thesis centers around the study of process; the process of taking a germinal concept or idea and translating it into the language of built form. In this particular case, the process can be described as binary, containing two distinct stages. The first stage consists of the process of translating a gestural idea or sketch into a language which is geometrically descriptive and consequently reproducible. The second stage of the process involves the translation of geometrical ideas into the language of construction. How can the dimensionless character of a geometrical model be expressed and accommodated architecturally? / Master of Architecture

This thesis is a study of architectural language for a place through the design and development of a citizen parking and plaza project. The site is located in the downtown Blacksburg area and not far from the Virginia Tech main campus.  By utilizing the idea of a lifted groundmass, the project creates a new place both for the town and the university. The space underneath the mass is a parking garage embedded in the ground, while the top surface of the mass is designed to be a hard pavement citizen plaza. This thesis aims to create more than just a space alone, but a memorable place that people will use and care about for years. The design of the groundmass addresses the issues of its boundary, materials, structure and other issues in an architectural language. / Master of Architecture

Architecture as an act of social intervention is the concept of this project. Careful consideration of context and surrounding as well as community needs are the forces behind the creation of a building that is both a place of transition and interaction; a place that both philosophically and programmatically intends to enhance the life of the town's population by promoting social and civic togetherness. Through the architectural concept of flexibility it is my intention to make a center that would not only house several permanent activities at once, but will also be able to host as many types of temporary activities as the community can imagine. The building intervening as a social unifier provides both the local and the university communities a place to interact and play together. The chosen site is ideal for this project, since its location is considered as a bridge between downtown and the university campus, thus making it easier to generate an activity space where both could meet throughout the year. The proposed building design reflects this "bridge" condition of the site by turning itself into an urban icon of different qualities; the building that becomes a plaza, the plaza that becomes a building. / Master of Architecture

Toll plaza operation is a critical component of roadway operations throughout the United States, as tolls provide both revenue for expansion and opportunity for demand management. Originally cash or physical currency based, tolling has morphed to meet the twentieth century demand in terms of throughput and efficiency in the form of electronic toll collection. Electronic tolling has introduced a new form of driver decision making at toll plazas due to the additional payment choice. Despite the user convenience these facilities provide to consumers, this form of collection has not come without safety and operational concerns. Confusion at the toll plaza, unsafe merging maneuvers, and the unexpected behavior has actually increased certain crash patterns at toll plazas in some electronic tolling facilities. Building upon existing research, further work was completed to quantify the related impacts of electronic toll collection on traffic operations through a microsimulation model, and static evaluation study. While in Massachusetts overall toll plaza crashes are a minimal portion of 200,000 crashes each year in the Commonwealth at less than 0.1 percent of all crashes some toll plazas have higher crash rates than the state wide urban interstate average. Interchange 14 in Weston, Massachusetts had the highest crash rate among state toll plazas. Rear-end and same direction sideswipe collisions accounted for the highest crash numbers between the years 2010 and 2012. Microsimulation of various lane configurations derived from static evaluation feedback on driver decision making created six alternate configurations. Current plaza configuration was verified by the validated VISSIM microsimulation model to be the highest performing in terms of efficiency. A lane configuration with grouped payment lanes provided the best overall performance for alternatives with less than 1 percent difference from the current West Springfield interchange configuration. Static evaluation and microsimulation results pointed to increased efficiency and safety benefits with combination lanes. Additionally, drivers tended to avoid following heavy vehicles through plaza lanes. Motorists were willing to make up to 3 lane changes to avoid queues and may avoid combination lanes as an electronic toll customer if they anticipate a greater delay than an adjacent dedicated electronic lane. Recommendations for future research include: 1) further microsimulation modeling to examine traffic flow and safety impacts at toll plazas under varying traffic conditions and demand with open road tolling lanes strategies; and 2) developing enhancements to VISSIM to address parameter limitations associated with discrete choice modeling at toll plazas.

A great deal of research has been conducted on Central Florida toll roads to better understand the characteristics of the tolling operation. In this thesis, the development and calibration of a toll plaza simulation models will be analyzed using two simulation programs varying mostly in their modeling theory. The two models utilized are, SHAKER, a deterministic queuing model for vehicles utilizing toll collection facilities, and VISSIM, a globally popular stochastic simulation software. The benefits of simulation models leads to the purpose of this thesis, which is to examine the effectiveness of two toll modeling programs that are similar in purpose but vary in approach and methodology. Both SHAKER and VISSIM toll plaza models have the potential to work as a tool that can estimate the maximum throughput and capacity of toll plazas. Major operational benefits resulting from developing these models are to simulate and evaluate how traffic conditions will change when demand increases, when and if queues increase when a lane is closed due to maintenance or construction, the impact of constructing additional lanes, or determining whether or not the best lane type configuration is currently implemented. To effectively calibrate any model available site data must be used to compare simulation results to for model validity. In an effort to correctly calibrate the SHAKER toll plaza tool and VISSIM model, an extensive field collection procedure was conducted at four Florida Turnpike operated toll facilities located in Central Florida. Each site differed from the others in terms of number of lanes, lane configuration, toll base fee, highway location, traffic demand, and vehicle percentage. The sites chosen for data collection were: the Lake Jesup Mainline Plaza along the Seminole Expressway (SR-417), the Beachline West Expressway Toll Plaza along the SR-528, the Daniel Webster Western Beltway Plaza along SR-429, and the Leesburg Toll Plaza along the Florida Turnpike Mainline SR-91. Upon completion of calibration of the two simulation models it is determined that each of the two software are successful in modeling toll plaza capacity and queuing. As expected, each simulation model does possess benefits over the other in terms of set up time, analysis reporting time, and practicality of results. The SHAKER model setup takes mere seconds in order to create a network and input vehicle, another few seconds to calibrate driving parameters, and roughly 10 additional seconds to report analysis. Conversely, setting up the VISSIM model, even for the most experienced user, can take several hours and the report analysis time can take several more hours as it is dependant on the number of required simulation runs and complexity of the network. VISSIM is most beneficial by the fact that its modeling allows for driver variability while SHAKER assumes equilibrium amongst lane choice and queuing. This creates a more realistic condition to observed traffic patterns. Even though differences are prevalent, it is important that in each simulation model the capacity is accurately simulated and each can be used to benefit operational situations related to toll plaza traffic conditions.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Thesis (M. Hous. M.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006.

Simulation modeling is the most cost-effective way of studying real life transportation problems, either existing or anticipated, without disturbing the balance of the transportation system. There is a vast suite of simulation models available in market, ready to choose from macroscopic, mesoscopic, or microscopic in nature, to study different transportation system elements like freeways, highways, signalized and un-signalized intersections. However, most of these network simulation models, like PARAMICS, VISSIM, CORSIM … etc, do not come readily available with built in toll plaza models. On the other hand, many researchers have independently developed toll plaza models, which can only model an isolated toll plaza without the road network. These toll plaza models, which are based on queuing theory (and some are macroscopic in nature), do not take into account headway, gap acceptance, or inter-vehicle interaction to follow a lead car or to perform lane changing maneuvers. Vehicles just upstream of the toll plaza are assigned to one of the toll lanes, solely based on the payment method (manual, automatic coin machine, or electronic toll collection) and queue lengths at the toll lanes. For instance, if a vehicle is traveling in the leftmost lane and the rightmost toll lane has the shortest queue length, then the queuing model will assign this vehicle to the rightmost lane, and the vehicle will do unrealistic maneuvering to reach to the assigned toll lane instantly. Microscopic network simulation models simulate the vehicular movements based on lane-changing and car-following rules. If such a model could be customized to serve the purpose of the toll plaza simulation, it will simulate the vehicular movements just upstream and downstream of the toll plaza more realistically. Being a network simulation model, it can also model the road network integrated with the plaza, which can be used to study the entire toll road corridor, unlike the isolated toll plaza models. In addition to being a microscopic network simulation model, PARAMICS has many simulation tools, which can be customized to develop a network model with enhanced toll plaza simulation capabilities. PARAMICS also provides the flexibility of using an aerial picture of the toll plaza and upstream/downstream sections of the road as overlay, to ensure that the toll plaza model operates under similar geometric conditions as the real plaza. Using an overlay, exact details of the transition area can be fed into the model. In real life, there is a smooth transition (in terms of the number of lanes and the width of the roadway) from the uniform free-flowing section of the roadway to the toll plaza. Detailed representation of the transition area, in terms of geometry and curb of the roadway along with the number of lanes, is essential for a realistic toll plaza simulation. This kind of detail is not available in a queuing model. As the roadway approaches the toll plaza, it contains more lanes compared to its upstream segments. However, in a simulation model vehicles have a tendency to maintain the same old lanes, and the newly added lanes remain unoccupied by the vehicles. Next-lane Allocation feature in PARAMICS can be used to map upstream lanes onto downstream lanes, preventing this unrealistic behavior from occurring in the simulation model. It tells the vehicles in a particular upstream lane to choose from one or more of the downstream lanes as per the settings. Next-lane allocation can be used in such a manner that all the downstream lanes are utilized. PARAMICS has several other tools such as Restrictions Manager, Vehicle Type Manager, Lane-choices Rules, HOV Lanes, and Vehicle Actuated (VA) Signals which can be used in combination to build a toll plaza model. A microscopic 'Holland East Plaza - SR408' network model has been developed using PARAMICS V5.1. This model contains the plaza and the downstream section of SR 408 Westbound till I-4 interchange in downtown Orlando. This model has been successfully calibrated and validated for the mainline toll plaza and ramp volumes for year 2004. Several hypothetical incident scenarios were simulated to study an entire corridor from the toll plaza to Interstate 4. It was found that the volumes on I-4 off-ramp and SR 408 mainline were affected the most under incident conditions. Volumes for other ramps were not affected in the same proportions. An incident on mainline toll road affected the throughput of the plaza significantly, but the same is not true for an incident on an off-ramp. Travel times to I-4 off-ramps and SR 408 thru lanes were the most sensitive in each of the incident scenarios. In case of the elimination of tolls during the hurricane evacuation, the throughput of the plaza increased significantly. Travel times for the vehicles coming through the plaza and going to different destinations decreased significantly, while it increased for vehicles using on-ramps, because of their inability to merge in the mainline traffic due to the increased toll road volume. The developed model in this thesis has the potential of transportation network wide applications with multiple toll plazas.

No description available.

La presente tesis se propone analizar la conformación, despliegue y articulación como grupo de un conjunto de empresarios del sur bonaerense cuyo centro de operaciones fue la localidad de Bahía Blanca entre 1884 y 1914. Para cumplimentar este propósito nos centramos en las condiciones sociales y productivas que determinaron este proceso y en el rol que el Estado y la política tuvo en ello. Además de insertarlos en la problemática acerca de los sectores empresarios de la gran expansión agraria argentina -sus patrones de inversión, diversificación, operaciones-, se busca inquirir sobre su incidencia política y social y el alcance de sus operaciones a nivel territorial. Para esto, se propone una reducción de escala que permita advertir estos procesos en un conjunto de agentes y las estrategias empleadas para participar en los cambios económicos que se experimentaban dentro del área pampeana. No obstante, para explicar cabalmente la acción de los mismos recurrimos, no solo a herramientas ligadas a su labor individual, sino también a otras provenientes de la historia social con el fin de abordar sus redes, la sociabilidad y las asociaciones. Partimos de la hipótesis que la conformación como grupo de estos empresarios se articularía con la construcción y desarrollo de una plaza comercial en Bahía Blanca para la exportación y el consumo, ya que la misma habría requerido de acciones y estrategias conjuntas que, no solo repercutieron en los negocios particulares, sino coadyuvaron a un mejor posicionamiento de la misma en el concierto nacional. De este supuesto general se derivan dos hipótesis secundarias. En primer término, las bases para la construcción de una plaza comercial fueron erigidas por los poderes públicos a partir de una serie de iniciativas que involucraron a empresas extranjeras de comunicaciones, cuyas relaciones con el empresariado fueron contradictorias en momentos de crisis al disputarse la distribución de los beneficios. En segundo lugar, aunque unidos en lo económico porque sus objetivos de acumulación se ligaban a la plaza bahiense, este grupo se encontraba fragmentado políticamente ya sea con respecto al poder municipal como en las instancias provincial y nacional haciendo que estos factores, y en especial la lógica misma de los espacios políticos, complejizaran los acuerdos económicos. / This thesis aims to analyze the formation, deployment and articulation as a group of entrepreneurs from the south of Buenos Aires whose center of operations was the town of Bahía Blanca between 1884 and 1914. To fulfill this purpose, we focus on the social and productive conditions that determined this process and in the role that the State and politics had in it. In addition to inserting them into the problem about the business sectors of the argentinian “gran expansión agraria” - their investment patterns, diversification, operations -, it seeks to inquire about their political and social impact and the scope of their operations at the territorial level. For this, a scale reduction is proposed that allows to notice these processes in a set of agents and the strategies used to participate in the economic changes that were experienced within the Pampean area. However, to fully explain their action we resort, not only to tools linked to the individual work of entrepreneurs, but also to others from social history in order to address their networks, sociability and associations. We start from the hypothesis that the formation as a group of these businessmen would be articulated with the construction and development of a “plaza comercial” in Bahía Blanca for export and consumption, since it would have required joint actions and strategies that not only had an impact on private businesses, but contributed to a better positioning of it in the national scene. Two secondary hypotheses follow from this general assumption. In the first place, the bases for the construction of a “plaza comercial” were erected by the public powers from a series of initiatives that involved foreign communications companies, whose relations with the business community were contradictory in times of crisis when they disputed the distribution of the benefits. Secondly, although united economically because their accumulation objectives were linked to the Bahia Blanca’s “plaza”, this group was politically fragmented with respect to municipal power and in both the provincial and national instances, causing these factors, and especially logic of political spaces will make economic agreements more complex.