Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Mavris, Dimitri; Committee Member: Gallman, John; Committee Member: Lewe, Jung-Ho; Committee Member: Schrage, Daniel; Committee Member: Upton, Eric. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 34-35).

Distance based vehicle insurance (sometimes know as “Pay as you drive,” “Pay by the mile” or “Pay per-km” insurance) has long been advocated by transportation planners as a transportation demand management (TDM) strategy. In addition to reducing congestion and greenhouse gas emissions, it also has the potential to meet a number of planning goals, such as health and equity improvements. Despite the wide interest in and predicted benefits of distance based insurance, there is little consensus on the detailed design of a system that could be implemented. Five main distance based pricing schemes have been proposed: a flat per-km rate, temporal or “time of day” pricing, road-type pricing, demographic pricing and “differential” pricing, which prices low mileages at a higher per-km rate. Each of these systems treats risk differently and thus results in different cross-subsidies between drivers. The proposal’s design thus has implications for an insurance system’s fairness and equity. This report examines the distribution of crash risk across time, across space, and across the different demographic groups. It then compares the current annual insurance system’s treatment of risk with that of various proposals for distance based insurance. It evaluates each proposal, considering its treatment of risk and its potential for increasing fairness and equity of costs and of mobility. It also examines each proposal’s other impacts, such as effectiveness in maintaining privacy and in reducing health impacts, greenhouse gas emissions and congestion. The recommended model is a flat per-km rate. Each driver would pay the same rate for every kilometer driven, regardless of time or place. However, individual drivers’ per-km rates would vary, depending on current insurance rating factors, such as residential location, type of car and driving record. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

Land use grain is a commonly-used measure of the mixture of land uses in the urban environment in transportation planning and public health, but there is no standard measurement practice in place. This thesis examines the meaning and common measurements of land use grain in these subfields. The entropy-based equation, the jobs-to-housing ratio, and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) are among the most common measures of land use grain, but results from these metrics differ depending upon how researchers choose a sample area and upon how land use categories are defined. All three metrics are performed, in a single context with varying assumptions, using the neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester in Boston, MA. The entropy-based equation was deemed the most appropriate measure in a general context, with the HHI and the jobs-to-housing ratio potentially appropriate in specific contexts.

Transportation engineering has taken upon a new role; to empower the alternative modes of travel: walking, biking, and bus transit. In this new era, engineers are rethinking a network designed predominately for the automobile. The ultimate goal of this research is to create a process that can make a vehicle dominant corridor a desirable, livable thoroughfare by livability design and context sensitive performance measures. Balancing travel modes requires an account of vehicular traffic and the impact of reconfiguring existing conditions. The analysis herein is conducted by field data collection, transportation equations and microsimulation. Simulating traffic behavior will be the means to apply livable alternatives comparable to existing Southeast Florida conditions. The results herein have shown that micro-simulation can be utilized in transportation planning to reveal good livability alternatives. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015 / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Nowadays it is very hard to find available spots in public parking lots and even harder at facilities such as universities and sports venues. A system that provides drivers with parking availability and parking lot occupancy will allow users find a parking space much easier and faster. This thesis presents a system for automatic parking lot occupancy computation using motion tracking. The use of computer vision techniques and low cost video sensors makes it possible to have an accurate system that allows drivers to find a parking spot. Video bitrate and quality reduction and its impact on performance were studied. It was concluded that high quality video is not necessary for the proposed algorithm to obtain accurate results. The results show that relatively inexpensive and low bandwidth networks can be used to develop large scale parking occupancy applications. / by Francisco Alberto Justo Torres. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

Today, numerous alternative modes of mobility are emerging to provide a solution to the problems created by the automobile. This research envisions a future where transportation in urban areas will be dominated by small personal mobility devices (PMDs) instead of automobiles. This Intelligent Mobility System (IMS) would be a car-free zone where people travel by a shared-system of PMDs providing levels of mobility greater than walking but less than a car. This research effort focuses on the operational aspects of this future system by studying PMD performance characteristics as inputs for a computer simulation model of an IMS environment. Therefore, the primary objective of this research is to evaluate the operations of PMDs that are currently used in a variety of settings. GPS recorders are used to log speed and location data each second of pedestrian, bicycle, Segway, and electric cart trips. Segway speed and acceleration are analyzed using three factors, sidewalk width, surface quality, and pedestrian density to study their effect on Segway speed. Pedestrians have the lowest mean speed and the most narrow speed distribution. Segways, bicycles and electric carts have increasingly faster mean speeds and wider speed distributions, respectively. Segways and bicycles were found to have similar acceleration distributions. Segways seem to provide a level of speed and mobility between that of pedestrians and cyclists, meaning that Segways might capture new users by providing a level of mobility and convenience previously unseen. Narrow sidewalk widths, poor sidewalk quality, and heavy pedestrian density all decreased Segway speeds. The researchers suspect that surface quality is likely an independent constraint for Segway speed and that sidewalk width and pedestrian density interact to limit Segway speeds under certain conditions. This research concludes that these external factors may affect PMD speed and should be considered when analyzing PMD mobility, especially in an IMS setting.

Reducing vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) has become an important goal for improving environmental outcomes and reducing the costs of travel and infrastructure. One way to accomplish such reductions could be to enact policies that foster more compact development. However, while it is accepted that compact development is associated with lower VMT, there remain disagreements about the efficacy of this policy lever. One issue casting doubt on the power of compact development relates to travelers' exposure to density. A conventional view holds that many travelers' neighborhoods are "locked in place" because change in established neighborhoods is slow. Additionally, conventional explanations of the effect of denser development focus on travelers' own neighborhoods, or on the metro area as a whole, failing to isolate the effect of densifying nodes near, but outside of, the travelers' neighborhoods. This study employs housing and travel data from the Seattle-Tacoma, Wash., where policies aimed at encouraging compact development have been in place since the mid-1990s. Findings suggest that 1) in established neighborhood, incremental change often results in exposure to substantially higher density, and 2) that even where localized density is constant, increases in density at intentional nodes or other areas near, but outside of, a traveler's own neighborhood, has a strong effect on VMT. The findings tend to undermine some of the key doubts about using land use as a policy lever for VMT reduction.

Suburban growth in the U.S. urban regions has been defined by large subdivisions of single-family detached units. This growth is made possible by the mobility supported by automobiles and an extensive highway network. These dispersed and highly automobile-dependent developments have generated a large body of work examining the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of suburban growth on cities. The particular debate that this study addresses is whether suburban residents are more energy intensive in their travel behavior than central city residents. If indeed suburban residents have needs that are not satisfied by the amenities around them, they may be traveling farther to access such services. However, if suburbs are becoming like cities with a wide range of services and amenities, travel might be contained and no different from the travel behavior of residents in central areas. This paper will compare the effects of long term suburban growth on travel behavior, energy consumption, and GHG emissions through a case study of neighborhoods in central Phoenix and the city of Gilbert, both in the Phoenix metropolitan region. Motorized travel patterns in these study areas will be generated using 2001 and 2009 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data by developing a four-step transportation demand model in TransCAD. Energy consumption and GHG emissions, including both Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) and Nitrous Oxide (N₂O) for each study area will be estimated based on the corresponding trip distribution results. The final normalized outcomes will not only be compared spatially between Phoenix and Gilbert within the same year, but also temporally between years 2001 and 2009 to determine how the differential land use changes in those places influenced travel. The results from this study reveal that suburban growth does have an impact on people's travel behaviors. As suburbs grew and diversified, the difference in travel behavior between people living in suburban and urban areas became smaller. In the case of shopping trips the average length of trips for suburban residents in 2009 was slightly shorter than that for central city residents. This convergence was substantially due to the faster growth in trip lengths for central city compared to suburban residents in the 8-year period. However, suburban residents continue to be more energy intensive in their travel behavior, as the effect of reduction in trip length is likely to be offset by the more intensive growth in trip frequency. Additionally, overall energy consumption has grown significantly in both study areas over the period of study.