• Contents
• Message from the Co-General Editors
• Minimum Speed Limit
• Pavement Condition
• Winter Highway Maintenance
• Right-of-Way Acquisition
• Journey to Work
• GPS Devices
• Rail Line Abandonment
• ATV Transportation Corridor
• Neural Network
• Aircraft Fleets
• Benefits of Transport
• Privatizing Toll Roads

• Table of Contents
• Journal Archives
• TRF Home

A Message from the JTRF Co-General Editors

This year was a good one for JTRF because it marks the first time that the new JTRF was published three times per year in the spring, summer and fall. The Fall 2005 issue contains the usual wide variety of transportation topics that distinguishes JTRF from the other transportation journals. Topical areas include:

• Operational and safety evaluation of freeways with minimum speed limits
• Automated pavement condition surveys
• Use of weather forecasts for winter highway maintenance
• Right-of-way acquisition and property condemnation
• Urban journey-to-work trips
• Evaluation of coordinated intersections with GPS
• County-level impacts of rail line abandonments
• Cost-benefit analysis of an ATV corridor in southwest Alaska
• Analysis of the impact of passenger activity on bus dwell and travel time
• Choice of aircraft types by U.S. airlines

In "Operational and Safety Evaluation of Freeways with Posted Minimum Speed Limit," Victor Muchuruza and Renatus Mussa evaluate the impact of slow driving and speed variation on highway crashes. They found that only 0.14% of drivers had speeds below 40 mph, but 9% of crash-involved vehicles had speeds below 40 mph. They also found that speed variation increases the frequency of crashes and that crashes could be reduced by raising the minimum speed limit.

Jay K. Lindly, Frank Bell, and Sharif Ullah discuss automated techniques to record pavement conditions in "Specifying Automated Pavement Condition Surveys." The authors describe the upgrade of the Alabama Department of Transportation's automated pavement condition survey specifications. The paper provides useful information concerning costs, standards, and survey methodology that will be valuable to other state DOTs as they automate their systems.

In "Multi-Measure Quality Analysis of Weather Forecasts Used for Winter Highway Maintenance Purposes," Sunanda Dissanayake, Wei He, Dean Landman, and Mary Knapp evaluated the quality and value of winter weather forecasts of three providers of forecasts to the Kansas DOT. The authors present a quality analysis of the forecasts to identify the most accurate provider in terms of predicting frost events. The authors evaluated quality of the forecasts using six attributes including reliability, accuracy, skill, resolution, sharpness, and uncertainty. They said the methodology could be used by any state DOT to evaluate winter weather forecast performance.

Shadi Hakimi and Kara M. Kockelman compare state condemnation statutes, noting their strengths and weaknesses, in "Right-of-Way Acquisition and Property Condemnation: A Comparison of U.S. State Laws." Hakimi and Kockelman recommend modifications to current state laws to expedite the acquisition process, minimize cost, and build property owners' trust in government. They also conduct a statistical analysis of how state characteristics affect condemnation rates.

In "The Journey to Work: 25 Years on the Jamaicaway," Carl Martland summarized Boston area traffic congestion characteristics using 600 recorded journey-to-work times for his home-to-work trip over the 1980-2004 period. He found that over the 25-year period there was little change in rush hour trip times despite an increase in traffic volume of about 10%. Martland noted that average travel times were mostly in the range of 25-27 minutes. He said variability of trip time is mostly related to variability in the delays associated with the most congested intersections.

Yi Jiang, Shuo Li, and Zhonghua Zhao present methods for applying GPS devices to evaluate traffic delays at coordinated intersections (intersections with coordinated green light time) in "Performance Evaluation of Coordinated Intersections with GPS Devices." The authors evaluated several types of intersection delay including travel-time delay, stopped-time delay, time-in-queue delay, approach delay, and total delay. They found that these intersection delays are difficult to measure manually, but with GPS-collected vehicle-positioning data they can be either directly identified or indirectly derived. The authors noted that their methodology can be used by traffic engineers to identify problem locations and determine traffic-control strategies for performance improvement.

In "County-Level Impacts of Rail Line Abandonments: A Kansas Case Study," James Sanderson and Michael Babcock use econometric panel data techniques to estimate economic impacts of rail line abandonment at the county level. Sanderson and Babcock measured the effects of abandonment on the real personal-income growth rate, real transfer-payments growth rate, real wage and salaries growth rate, and total full and part-time employment growth rate for rural, urban, and metropolitan Kansas counties. They found that abandonments produce an initial period of economic growth that may be temporary, and any adverse impacts occur with a time lag of a few years.

Lee Elder and Andy Seidl examine the benefits and costs of an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) geotextile corridor connecting villages in the Kuskokwim River Delta in southwest Alaska. They compared the costs of constructing the trail to the benefits of reduced injuries, fatalities, and fuel consumption on the existing river corridor over a 20 year period. They found that the geotextile ATV corridor to be an economically feasible transportation alternative, given the geographic context of the study.

In "Using a Neural Network to Analyze the Impact of Passenger Activity on Bus Dwell Time and Travel Time," Mei Chen and Xiaobo Liu used a model based on automatic vehicle location (AVL) and automatic passenger counter (APC) technology to analyze relationships between passenger activity and bus dwell time (time that elapses between the first and last passengers boarding the bus) and station-to-station travel time. Chen and Liu noted that transit providers could use their methods to identify the causes of schedule deviation and to develop measures that are most effective in improving transit service. They found that passenger boardings were the most significant contributor to variation of dwell time. The second most important factor in dwell time variation was the number of stops made on a route segment, which was also an important determinant of station-to-station travel time.

Dipasis Bhadra uses data from the first half of 2004 to measure the empirical relationships between aircraft choice and number of passengers, trip distance, types of airport hubs and networks, and season of the year in "Choice of Aircraft Fleets in the U.S. Domestic Scheduled Air Transportation System: Findings from a Multinomial Logit Analysis." The author found that the number of passengers and trip distance had the greatest impact on aircraft choice. He further pointed out that by using the estimated coefficients from the aircraft choice model, with varying assumptions about the key variables, that forecasts of aircraft operations by market segment and aircraft fleet mix can be generated.

Kofi Obeng
Co-General Editor - JTRF

Michael W. Babcock
Co-General Editor - JTRF

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