John Hennessy III,
P.E.
This report provides an approach for incorporating resilience into transportation planning and assessment for state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations. We build on the Federal Highway Administration’s Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Framework (VAF) to better incorporate principles of resilience into the decisionmaking process for long-term transportation planning.
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The Interstate Highway System’s future is threatened by a persistent and growing backlog of physical and operational deficiencies and by a number of large and looming challenges. Most of its segments are decades old, subject to much heavier traffic than anticipated, and operating well beyond their design life without having undergone major upgrades or reconstruction.
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This video provides special coverage of the 2017 Transportation Research Board (TRB) 96th Annual Meeting held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, in Washington, D.C. January 8–12. In this video, TRB Executive Director Neil Pedersen discusses his agency’s outreach to the Trump administration and he also explains the meeting’s global appeal attracting this year, an estimated 13,000 transportation professionals from 70 countries.
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Not only is the highway network relied upon to transport people, but it is also the economic lifeline of the affected region facilitating the movement of emergency supplies and services. Restoring power, supplying fuel, transporting injured residents, and providing food stocks can be just a few of the critical needs of a region affected by a catastrophic event.
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While livability has received increasing attention in planning and policy circles recently, agreement as to how to define, measure, and create it has been elusive. This is especially true in terms of the livability benefits of transit investments. While livability definitions tend to boil livability down to serving diverse people with diverse opportunities (RITA Office of Research, Development, and Technology 2011), most have not been specific enough to measure it consistently and implement it effectively. Furthermore, getting specific about livability—particularly when focusing on the livability benefits of transit-supportive investments—may cause those who do not care for transit to dismiss it.
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AIRPORT COOPERATIVE RESEARCH PROGRAM
As major consumers of water, airports have an obligation to be responsible environmental stewards in the community by increasing the efficiency of their water use and decreasing the amount of energy they spend to heat and pump that water. These changes can lower airports’ costs, improving the financial as well as the environmental sustainability of their operations.
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD
This study reviews the demand for interregional travel in the United States and the uncertainties that arise in supplying transportation services and infrastructure to accommodate it. Consideration is given to relevant experience in other countries, especially in providing intercity passenger rail. A central finding is that appropriate analytical tools and up-to-date data on long-distance travel in the United States are lacking, which complicates decisions about how to invest in the country’s interregional corridors in ways that will serve future travelers most effectively and further other policy goals such as protecting the environment, enhancing safety, and curbing energy use.
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD
In recent years, the real value of fuel tax revenues has declined significantly as a result of increasing vehicle fuel efficiency, failure to adjust tax rates to keep up with inflation, and fewer miles driven. This decline in the purchasing power of the revenues collected has led to ongoing funding challenges for transportation infrastructure and increased uncertainty about future funding options. The long term sustainability of motor fuel taxes has come into question, in view of increasing fuel efficiency and possible shifts to alternative fuel vehicles. Interest has grown in the potential of replacing the current fuel tax — assessed at the federal level and in many states as a flat fee per gallon — with new road usage charge assessed on all miles traveled. This method is often referred to as a mileage-based user fee (MBUF), road usage charge (RUC), vehicle miles traveled (VMT) fee, or per-mile tax.
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD
Information and communication technologies, combined with smartphone applications and location data from global positioning systems, are making feasible transportation services that have long been imagined but never realized on a large scale. These innovations include carsharing; bikesharing; microtransit services; and, most notably, transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft.
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD
The future rarely moves in predictable, incremental ways. Often seemingly small changes in technology, demographics, regulations, economics, or a myriad of other factors have dramatic and unintended impacts on how any organization (public or private) plans and operates. These nonlinear impacts are very difficult to predict using traditional forecasting methods and techniques since they, by definition, do not follow any historical patterns.
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