An efficient trucking sector is essential to the State’s economic prosperity. However, rapid growth in trucking is placing a growing burden on state highways, in terms of both pavement maintenance and repair costs and congestion-induced traffic delays. To support better freight planning this project will: (1) Develop a set of performance metrics that can be used to evaluate and track trucking industry performance and its impacts on the State’s economy and the environment, identify developing problems, and plan improvements in truck freight mobility and access; (2) Identify and assess how well existing databases and other data sources support the proposed performance metrics, and (3) Identify methods and the level of effort required for collecting data to support improved performance measurement in the future. Special attention will be given to measures of travel time reliability, and to operation of the State’s high volume, long haul trucking corridors and their linkages to within-state seaports and rail intermodal facilities.

Several state DOTs are using green road design rating systems to assess the level to which roads meet certain green design criteria. We have identified nine road rating systems that are in various stages of development. There is a need for a comparative assessment of these different systems to determine their relative advantages and to assess their potential application in Georgia. This research will do a critical examination of these rating systems and summarize their advantages and disadvantages to possible application in GDOT. A workshop would be held with GDOT staff to discuss the different systems and potential application in Georgia.

This project will examine how environmental justice factors are considered in the transportation planning and decision making process. The intent is to assess the current approach and develop strategies for improving such consideration.

We will incorporate recent advances in traffic flow theory and simulation to build a framework able to provide short-term (up to ~30 min) travel time forecasts across the metropolitan Atlanta freeway network. This would allow us to predict the onset and propagation of congestion trough the network, and to improve current "real-time" travel time esti-mates in NaviGAtor (which are usually displayed with a ~10 min delay). Because off-the-shelf commercial simulation packages do not perform well in saturated freeways, we will use a traffic simulation model being developed at Georgia Tech, which is able to predict realistic traffic dynamics on congested freeways.

National studies have concluded that future petroleum-based gas taxes are not likely going to be sufficient to meet the needs of state transportation programs. What will happen to annual transportation revenues in Georgia over the next 30 years if the Motor Fuel Tax is not replaced? How do these revenue streams change if many of the strategies proposed under demand management, clean air, land use and transportation planning to reduce VMT are successful? This study will examine key trends in Georgia, declining VMT, increasing gas mileage, denser land use, and travel demand management strategies, that will cumulatively act to reduce the level of funding generated from the motor vehicle tax. The study will quantify the likely impacts and identify alternative funding sources.

As current funding sources are proving to be inadequate, alternative revenue sources, such as the VMT tax, sales tax, energy tax, parking tax, tolls, and others, are used or discussed around the United States to provide financing of transportation (improvement). In addition, these revenue sources are also designed in part to affect travel behaviors through the internalizing of travel costs. This research will measure stated and revealed behavior with respect to such alternative funding sources by conducting focus group and survey research.

Recent developments in the asset management program at the Georgia DOT include linking strategic goals with asset management, and the adoption of risk-based performance targets and factors for resource allocation. To support the next steps, this project will answer the following questions: (1) what items after pavements and bridges should be considered for inclusion in the asset management program? (2) what inventory data should be gathered on the assets? (3) what are the determining factors to measure risks? and (4) how should the risk factors be determined?

This study will examine the institutional and financial structure of Georgia’s truck weighing strategy. With declining state budgets, the staff working at the state’s weigh stations has been reduced, resulting in fewer operating hours. The impact of this reduced operation on the number of overweight trucks operating on the road without permits will be examined in this research. This study will examine the recent history of truck weighing efforts in the United States and the corresponding impact on permit revenues. Recommendations will be made that in essence makes a business case for improving the operation of the weigh-in-motion stations.

One of the popular funding strategies being considered in several states including Georgia is to allow local governments, especially counties, to create a transportation regional sales tax. This project would look at the implications of such a regional sales tax on the ability of counties to provide county-specific sales tax initiatives for transportation and other public services (e.g., schools).

The primary objective of the study is to investigate whether state-of-the-art mobility hubs can be created that include multiple modes of transportation and integration of novel information technologies that provide “mobility on demand.” Of immediate concern are the best choices of vehicles and fuels (including electric vehicles) for shuttling passengers to the new international terminal, and how the service can be extended to surrounding neighborhoods for increased access to transportation and employment. Of broader and long-term concern is realizing the potential of airport- and transit-adjacent development to accommodate new growth without worsening traffic congestion and air quality.

The Georgia Tech team will adapt the communications technology test bed established for a National Science Foundation (NSF) distributed simulation project to evaluate the performance and suitability of construction work zone technologies. Such technologies would include various vehicle speed and presence detectors, flashing warning lights, etc. The current test bed, located between 10th Street to North Avenue, and Spring Street and the GT campus, will be adapted to provide data connectivity points that allow deployed technologies at pre-set locations to communicate with the GT server systems. Because the NSF test bed already has video monitoring systems in place, these corridors can be used to evaluate the accuracy, precision, and impact of these technologies. Once the test bed is operational, GDOT will be able to provide new technologies to the testing team, who will set up field experiments in the test bed to evaluate performance and verify manufacturer claims. The GT team will assess the suitability of the technologies for establishing benchmark and work zone performance metrics and evaluate communications demands. As technologies are verified, GT will work with the state DOT to undertake a construction zone deployment for final testing.

The goal of the data preparation element of the project will be to summarize the second-by-second Commute Atlanta instrumented vehicle data and create data subsets that can be used in various research activities. However, the data must be processed in such a manner that ensures the confidentiality of the data will not be breached.  A data set will be compiled from approximately 100 households for which complete household and vehicle level data are available over the study period. These data will be processed for use in household-level travel behavior analysis. In the household-level data set, detailed travel summaries will be retained (trip time, date, distance, duration, origin zone, destination zone, trip purpose, etc.), and these data will be linked to household demographic characteristics. A second data set will be prepared for corridor-level data analysis. This data set will be comprised of segments of second-by-second data taken from approximately 300 vehicles, where the data are directly linked to specific travel corridors of interest (freeways and major arterials).

An important gap that has been identified in research on asset management has been identifying how agencies should go about setting performance standards for performance measures used in highway investment decision making, and what performance measures are best in making investment decisions for roadway assets. The objectives of this research are to provide guidance on the 1) relative effectiveness of various performance measurement systems for transportation asset management decision making and (2) impacts of setting alternative standards on system productivity both in highway and multimodal systems. Better measures and improved targets can increase customer satisfaction and result in cost savings for the transportation agency.

Benefits to decision makers of providing information on such issues include the answers to the following questions: 1) What are appropriate performance targets in each performance category? 2) How would system benefits change if the performance targets were reduced slightly? What would be the associated cost reductions? 3) How are these changes likely to affect customer satisfaction? 4) What matrix of targets (for the different performance categories) is likely to result in increased customer satisfaction with relatively changes in costs? and 5) What are the risks of setting performance standards based on historical practice without any cogent analysis? This research addresses questions such as these related to performance targets, that, when answered, can improve the cost effectiveness of investments in highway and other modal systems and increase user satisfaction.

The specific objectives of this research are to determine the feasibility of integrating real-time data and simulation and to conduct a field test of the proposed methodology on a target corridor. Additionally, as part of the real-time simulation calibration and prediction effort the benefit of real time probe vehicle data will be explored (e.g. GPS instrumented vehicles, cellular probe data, etc.). The ability to include probe vehicle data in the field test will be subject to probe vehicle data availability.

The major objective of this research project is to identify the key dimensions of sustainable mobility as it is evolving in the United States and in several other countries. The project will critically assess these dimensions from the perspective of how they might relate to a state department of transportation (DOT). This research is really at the front edge of a perspective on transportation that is gaining strength in the United States, and thus can provide an important foundation for potential future directions of state DOTs.