Publications

Summary:
The growth of home deliveries, lower inventory levels and just-in-time deliveries drive the fragmentation of freight flows, increased frequency, more delivery addresses and smaller volumes. This leads to trucks inefficiently loaded and consequently more trucks in the road contributing to the growing congestion in cities. According to a study by INRIX and the Texas Transportation Institute, travelers in the U.S.

Summary:
Public transportation could be an important component of a solution to providing mobility while reducing traffic congestion and the environmental impact of transportation. However, from a customer perspective, a mobility choice is only a choice if it is fast, comfortable and reliable. This research looks at the reliability of public transportation and the use of easy-to-access information to combat the inherent unreliability and other barriers to increased use that exist in the system.

Summary:
Mobility services including carsharing and transportation network company (TNC) services have been growing rapidly in North America and around the world. Measuring the effects of these services on traveler behavior is challenging because the results of any such analysis are sensitive to how (1) outcomes are measured and (2) counterfactuals are constructed.

Summary:
This study proposes a solution framework for operational analysis and financial assessment of transit services that considers the passenger behavior and the elasticity of transit demand to service characteristics. The proposed solution framework integrates a dynamic transit passenger assignment model (Fast-Trips) with a mode choice model and a service design module, and iterates these methods until an equilibrium between fares and frequencies is reached.

Summary:
This study aims to identify factors correlated with dwell time for commercial vehicles (the time that delivery workers spend performing out-of-vehicle activities while parked). While restricting vehicle dwell time is widely used to manage commercial vehicle parking behavior, there is insufficient data to help assess the effectiveness of these restrictions, which makes it difficult for policymakers to account for the complexity of commercial vehicle parking behavior.

Summary:
Despite significant advances in freight transport modeling in recent years, there is still lack of available tools for evaluating novel logistics solutions. We introduce the framework of SimMobility Freight, which is part of SimMobility, a multi-scale agent-based urban transportation simulation platform. SimMobility Freight is capable of simulating commodity contracts, logistics and vehicle operation planning and parking decisions in a fully-disaggregate manner.

Summary:
Although road infrastructure has been designed to accommodate human drivers’ physiology and psychology for over a century, human error has always been the main cause of traffic accidents. Consequently, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have been developed to mitigate human shortcomings. These automated functions are becoming more sophisticated allowing for Automated Driving Systems (ADS) to drive under an increasing number of road conditions.

Summary:
The examination of commercial pilot workload often requires the use of controlled simulated studies to identify causal effects. The specific scenarios to consider within a simulator study require an extensive understanding of the safety situations that can occur in flight while also considering the specific training that pilots are provided within a simulated environment.

Summary:
As e-commerce and urban deliveries spike, cities grapple with managing urban freight more actively. To manage urban deliveries effectively, city planners and policy makers need to better understand driver behaviors and the challenges they experience in making deliveries. In this study, we collected data on commercial vehicle (CV) driver behaviors by performing ridealongs with various logistics carriers.

Summary:
Through structured interviews with public agency and private company staff and a review of existing pilot project evaluations and curb management guidelines, this study surveys contemporary approaches to curb space management in 14 U.S. cities and documents the challenges and opportunities associated with them. A total of 17 public agencies (including public works departments, transportation agencies, and metropolitan planning organizations) in every census region of the U.S.

Summary:
With ongoing population growth and rapid development in cities, the demand for goods and services has seen a drastic increase. Consequently, transportation planners are searching for new ways to better manage the flow of traffic on existing facilities, and more efficiently utilize available and unused capacity. In this research, a lane management strategy that allows freight vehicles to use bus-only lanes is empirically evaluated in an urban setting.

Summary:
Electric vehicles, one of the emerging modes of transportation, are at the forefront of sustainable mobility. In the past years, there has been a rapid rise in EVs, both as private and public transportation modes. Private users are influenced by multiple factors while choosing electric cars as their travel modes. Among them, policy and infrastructure are deemed to be the main influencers globally. These policies and infrastructures vary in different cities.

Summary:
In recent years, e-commerce has dramatically increased deliveries to residential areas. The rise in delivery vehicle activity creates externalities for the transportation system, including congestion, competition for parking space, and emissions. Common carrier lockers have emerged as a way to manage these effects by consolidating deliveries, but they remain largely untested in the United States.

Summary:
A central theme of U.S. transportation planning policies is to reduce single-occupancy vehicle (SOV) trips and promote transit and non-motorized transportation by coordinating land-use planning and transportation demand management (TDM) programs. Cities often implement TDM programs by intervening with new development during the municipal permit review process.

Summary:
This study is sponsored by Amazon, Bellevue Transportation department, Challenge Seattle, King County Metro, Seattle Department of Transportation, Sound Transit, and Uber, with support from the Mobility Innovation Center at UW CoMotion. Population and extended economic growth in many Seattle neighborhoods are driving increased demand for private car travel along with transportation services such as ridehailing and on-demand delivery.