Infrastructure

In the search for new sources of funding, federal, state, and local government officials in the U.S. have recently been exploring public private partnerships (PPPs). While promising, PPPs are neither a panacea nor an unwarranted gamble: both shining successes and troubling failures abound. Given the large variation in the efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and feasibility of public-private highway finance partnerships in past projects, federal and state officials have been enacting legislation and statutes to both promote PPPs and to protect public interests from the potential pitfalls of...

Lateral control of a vehicle in the Automated Highway System (AHS) has been formulated and simulated as part of the hierarchical AHS control structure. In that structure, lateral control resides in the vehicle, and is implemented as a closed-loop control system with the lateral deviation of the vehicle from a reference position as a controlled variable and the steering angle or its rate as a controlling input. The PATH AHS scenario has assumed a road reference and sensing system based on magnetic markers equally spaced along a highway lane. Freedom in the selection of the polarity of each...

BRT mixes the flexibility of traditional bus transit service with an array of higher performance rail transit features. One of its advantages over rail, however, is its possibility for incremental and flexible deployment. With this flexibility and incremental nature comes a deployment process for BRT that is highly complex because numerous elements can be incorporated in any number of distinct phases. In almost all BRT deployments, ITS and advanced bus technologies have been applied to BRT, however, in less than a fully integrated manner. This project explores how deployment decisions can...

This research identifies the operational concepts for managing cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) vehicle maneuvering and traffic flows. This includes approaches for grouping the CACC vehicles, ranging from ad-hoc to centrally coordinated strategies, and the incentives that could be used to facilitate the vehicle clustering, both operational and financial. These are particularly important at low market penetrations, when the CACC vehicles are likely to be widely separated. The dissolution of CACC strings is also discussed, since this needs to be done carefully to avoid adverse...