Transit improvements increase property values, and cities increasingly are asking real estate developers to help fund transit facilities that will benefit their projects, according to a report by the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Researchers have developed a population distribution model that provides unprecedented county-level predictions of where people will live in the U.S. in the coming decades.
Only about 2 percent of commuters in three metro areas - Atlanta, the Twin Cities and Los Angeles - reported pedaling their bicycles to the transit station, suggesting the need for better infrastructure, the UF researcher says.
Most cities’ transportation plans evoke a complex blend of environmental, economic, and social-equity goals – all aimed at promoting “sustainability.” Yet, many fail to include meaningful measurements of social-equity objectives, according to researchers at McGill University.
Not long after the World Wide Web gained acceptance by the general public in the early 1990s, scholars, policy makers, and others detected significant discrepancies in use among different groups of people. Dubbed the “digital divide,” the gaps in usage were especially significant along socioeconomic and racial/ethnic lines. While the digital divide has narrowed as technologies become ubiquitous throughout society, discrepancies still exist.
Open Streets initiatives temporarily close streets to automobile traffic so that people may use them for walking, bicycling, dancing, playing and socializing. Although the movement is gaining popularity in the United States — more than 100 different cities have hosted Open Streets events since 2008 — little is known about planning and implementing them. In a new paper Amy Eyler, PhD, and Aaron Hipp, PhD, both assistant professors at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, explore the development and implementation of Open Streets initiatives and make recommendations for increasing the capacity of organizers to enhance their success.
As a report from the Obama administration warns that one in four bridges in the United States needs significant repair or cannot handle automobile traffic, Tufts University engineers are employing wireless sensors and flying robots that could have the potential to help authorities monitor the condition of bridges in real time.
University of Washington engineers have designed a new communication system that uses radio frequency signals as a power source and reuses existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to provide Internet connectivity to battery-free devices.
A study by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories concludes that a number of existing gas stations in California can safely store and dispense hydrogen, suggesting a broader network of hydrogen fueling stations may be within reach.
Wayne State University, in partnership with the University of Michigan and Drexel University, has launched a two-and-a-half-year study of the imagination — or l'imaginaire — of high-speed rail (HSR) in America. The study is part of a larger comparative international study piloted by Dr. Max Bergman at the University of Basel and led by French, American, South African, Indian and Chinese research teams that is exploring the role of the “imaginaries” in choices relative to train and rail infrastructures. In other words, the study will examine what motivates decision makers (both leaders and users) in regard to championing or using trains both in and of themselves and within the context of the future of transportation as a whole.
A global catalog of 50 urban developments on six continents maps out the growing trend of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD). The survey, compiled by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), using its TOD Standard evaluation tool, shows which projects connect people conveniently, affordably and safely to jobs, shopping, education and other opportunities that cities provide.
Researchers are asking whether there is a "right" size for the U.S. power grid; they believe that smaller grids would reduce the likelihood of severe outages, such as the 2003 Northeast blackout, likening the grid behavior to sandpiles: “Sandpiles are stable until you get to a certain height. Then you add one more grain and the whole thing starts to avalanche.”
While Mother Nature continues to challenge drivers across the country, a team of traffic engineers is working hard on a new way to make rush-hour commutes safer and faster in any weather. “We can’t do much about snow falling, but we can do something about road capacity and congestion,” said Joseph Hummer, traffic engineering expert and Wayne State University College of Engineering chair of civil and environmental engineering.
1) The road to efficiency. 2) Zero Energy Ready Homes. 3) Cross-disciplinary research is yielding new insight into the carbon cycle, contaminated soils and soil fertility.
Engineering researchers at the University of Arkansas have developed a novel dynamic testing system for characterizing and evaluating the structural condition of short- to medium-span bridges – structures up to 300 feet long.
If the U.S. is to meet important challenges of the 21st century, a new paradigm for the building and retrofitting of critical pipeline infrastructure system will be required, one that addresses the conflicting goals of diverse economic, environment, societal, and policy interests, according to Sunil Sinha of Virginia Tech's College of Engineering who has led the development of a National Pipeline Infrastructure Database.
Though countries will likely improve their infrastructure networks substantially in the future, the current path points to millions of people without access to basic infrastructure, even by 2060, a new report finds.
A Sandia National Laboratories team completed acceptance testing on an enormous mobile scanner that makes smuggling radiological materials more difficult, the eighth such unit that Sandia has deployed worldwide.
Earthquakes never occur when you need one, so a team led by Johns Hopkins structural engineers is shaking up a building themselves in the name of science and safety. Using massive moving platforms and an array of sensors and cameras, the researchers are trying to find out how well a two-story building made of cold-formed steel can stand up to a lab-generated Southern California quake.
The Department of Homeland Security’s National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), jointly housed at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, studies how hurricanes and other disasters disrupt critical infrastructure, such as roads, electricity and water systems.
It is a long-held assumption that large cities benefit from economies of scale. New research by Boise State University visiting professor of economics Michail Fragkias questioning this assumption could help shape how major cities are built and managed in the coming decades.
Research conducted with a large new battery unveiled today in Oregon will help the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project make the electric system smarter and more efficient.
Cities around the world need ever-taller buildings as their populations grow and their infrastructures age, but most tall buildings are designed with too little regard for their urban contexts, according to a new book by an urban planner/designer at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The explosive popularity of wireless devices—from WiFi laptops to Bluetooth headsets to ZigBee sensor nodes—is increasingly clogging the airwaves, resulting in dropped calls, wasted bandwidth and botched connections.
The U.S. should adopt mileage-based road user fees to raise revenue to build and maintain roads and bridges, say faculty members at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
University of Florida research study adds new twist to previous studies of the nation's water supplies; finds that when infrastructure is included in the mix (reservoirs, dams, etc.), water vulnerability is less of a threat than previously believed.
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