Environment

Freeway traffic accidents are complicated events that are influenced by multiple factors including roadway geometry, drivers' behavior, traffic conditions and environmental factors. Among the various factors, crash occurrence on freeways is supposed to be strongly influenced by the traffic states representing driving situations that are changed by road geometry and cause the change of drivers' behavior. This paper proposes a methodology to investigate the relationship between traffic states and crash involvements on the freeway. First, the authors defined section-based traffic states: free...

Over the last decades the vehicle industry has shown interest in integrating new technologies on vehicles’ design. Such technologies are used in autonomous, connected and electrical vehicles with the primary hope of improving road safety and the environmental impact of road traffic. Regarding the environmental impact, the transport sector has been considered responsible for Greenhouse Gas emissions for the past thirty years or more, and efforts have been made to reduce impacts of such emissions on the environment. The environmental noise is also associated with road traffic and its effects...

Traditionally, the amount of air pollutant emissions from motor vehicles—hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and oxides of nitrogen—is estimated from emission factors based on trip and vehicle miles traveled and aggregate measures of vehicle activity (e.g., average vehicle speed). This method is not reliable for urban networks, as it does not consider the effect of traffic signals and congestion. There is a need to predict vehicle activity by mode of operation, i.e., time spent in cruise, acceleration, deceleration, and idle to obtain improved emission estimates. An analytical model for...

Convective weather is the leading cause of air traffic delay in the National Airspace System. In the current en-route rerouting process, dispatchers typically use the routes planned 45 minutes before pushback from the gate rendering these routes sometimes over-conservative due to transforming weather conditions. The Dynamic Weather Routes (DWR) tool, which is installed at the American Airlines (AA) Integrated Operations Center in Fort Worth Center since 2012, is an advanced user-support tool designed to automatically find time saving reroutes for flights in en-route airspace. However,...