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    <title>Research in Progress (RIP)</title>
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    <copyright>Copyright © 2026. National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.</copyright>
    <docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
    <managingEditor>tris-trb@nas.edu (Bill McLeod)</managingEditor>
    <webMaster>tris-trb@nas.edu (Bill McLeod)</webMaster>
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      <title>Research in Progress (RIP)</title>
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      <link>https://rip.trb.org/</link>
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      <title>
National Investigation of the Environmental, Safety and Livability Impacts of Travel Lane Width: Evidence from 10 American Cities</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2331768</link>
      <description><![CDATA[This project is one of the most comprehensive efforts to date to address a long overdue built environmental and transportation challenge to health: unnecessarily wide travel lanes that are designed to accommodate fast and convenient driving. There has been a constant competition for space in roadways’ right-of-way. In most American cities, the automobile is the winner of this competition, making it a challenge to find space for bike lanes and sidewalks. One of the easiest and most cost-efficient way to make space for cyclists and pedestrian is to narrow travel lanes and parking lanes to an optimal width. The main drawback is safety concerns. Are wider lanes safer? A recent study in seven US Cities by the PI found that narrower lanes do not have a higher number of crashes than their wider counterparts, after controlling for 21 functional and design street characteristics. This study builds on the earlier effort by (1) expanding sample to more than 1,500 street sections with three additional cities and measuring a comprehensive set of 21 micro-scale street design features for these streets; (2) quantifying the impact of narrow travel lane on traffic fatalities, pedestrian safety, and bicycle safety indicators; and (3) measuring the impact of narrow lane width on pedestrian volume and activities. Finally, from the national sample of ten cities, the PIs will select one lane width reduction project for further longitudinal analysis of traffic speed, roadway capacity (traffic volume), roadway safety (crash severity and frequency) and GHG emission impacts before and after the lane width reduction.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Feb 2024 10:04:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2331768</guid>
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    <item>
      <title>Improving Livability: Identifying Operational and Access Barriers to Active Transportation in Connecticut Communities</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2321727</link>
      <description><![CDATA["Improving Livability" is a comprehensive research initiative focused on identifying and addressing disparities in walking and biking conditions across Connecticut communities. The project is motivated by rising pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, often tied to historical development patterns and uneven infrastructure investment. This research will include a literature review and data analysis to examine differences in transportation safety related to factors such as race, ethnicity, and income. It will assess variations in access to safe infrastructure for active transportation and develop methods to evaluate safety outcomes, accounting for both reported and underreported incidents.

The project includes two phases: the first involves gathering and preparing data using crash records, U.S. Census demographic information, and land use data; the second phase, proposed for Year 2, will develop econometric models to identify key influences on pedestrian and cyclist safety and create a risk index to highlight high-risk areas in Connecticut. The project will provide practical insights for planners and other stakeholders, including toolkits and strategies to improve mobility and safety. Graduate research assistants will support the work, gaining experience while contributing to the project’s overall goal of making active transportation safer and more reliable for all communities.
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jan 2024 12:18:09 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2321727</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Assessing Navigatability and Livability of Public Transportation Systems</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1635901</link>
      <description><![CDATA[(forthcoming)]]></description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 08 Jul 2019 14:10:50 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1635901</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Integrating Freight Movement into 21st Century Communities' Land Use, Design, and Transportation Systems</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1628599</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Each day, about 60 million tons of freight valued at $40 billion moves through the United States transportation system. As cities and communities seek to encourage and implement mixed-use and human-scale development, it is important to consider the needs for commercial and residential goods movement, access, and mobility. Not doing so may lead to delivery trucks double-parking, blocking bike lanes, mounting curbs and sidewalks while driving, and other high-risk behavior when serving businesses and homes. Cities and suburbs also need street design and parking regulations that ensure trucks can efficiently access dense pick-up and delivery locations without creating roadway safety or maintenance concerns; incurring costly parking fines; or interfering with local vehicle, bike, transit, and pedestrian traffic. The same applies to the noise and other environmental impacts that trucks cause at a higher rate relative to smaller vehicles.

Research continues to underscore the significant disconnect between land-use decision-making and the freight-movement-related traffic associated with various land uses. Freight movement is mainly a private-sector activity with significantly different planning timeframes and objectives than the public sector, resulting in difficulties achieving useful public-private communication and collaboration. Useful commodity flow and volume information and data can be very difficult and costly for the public sector to acquire and apply in planning activities, resulting in transportation system plans and priorities that can under- or overestimate freight movement demand. State, regional, and local decision-making based on incomplete information can lead to land use, economic development, and transportation plans, policies, project priorities, and funding choices that do not address long-term mobility needs for people and freight.
 
 
The objective of this research is to develop a planning toolkit for public-sector decision-makers to better integrate freight and goods movement into the planning process for land use, design, and multimodal transportation systems. The toolkit should be scalable for all geographic and population densities and provide best practices and tools for implementation (e.g., education, model policies, development standards, and ordinances).]]></description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Jun 2019 13:14:52 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1628599</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Understanding Relationships Between the Built Environment, Physical Activity, Public Health, Urban Mobility, and Traffic Congestion: Graduate Curriculum Development (Project L2)</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1540504</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Evidence-based research from the public health profession has determined adverse factors associated with the built environment, transportation network, urban land use patterns, and travel mode choices are contributing to declining public health and rising healthcare costs in U.S. metropolitan areas. The objective of this project is to develop a multidisciplinary graduate-level course addressing the intersection between public health, transportation and the built environment. The methodology of this course will focus on establishing basis of need for and potential benefits from implementation of optimal solutions to the challenging dilemma of how the built environment impacts urban mobility, transportation infrastructure, network connectivity, sustainability, livability, and public health. Interconnections between the fields of physical activity, public health, public policy and engineering planning and design will be identified. The goal is for students with diverse backgrounds, in a variety of academic fields, to be able to evaluate urban, suburban communities, and neighborhoods to identify positive and adverse effects of the built environment on levels of physical activity and measures of public health, with an emphasis on adoption of polices and approaches for improving desirable outcomes supporting healthier communities. Currently, there is recognition of the need for physical activity, public health, and transportation professionals to work collaboratively. However, these three disparate fields have distinct methods and languages that often inhibit meaningful collaboration. To the best of our knowledge, this course will is the first of its kind. As such, it will bring together content from physical activity, public health, civil engineering, and transportation planning and community design. Anticipated result of this course will be education of professionals who will have requisite skills, knowledge, and abilities to facilitate collaborative efforts across multiple disciplines to improve physical activity, public health, built environment, and traffic congestion outcomes.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 Sep 2018 12:38:56 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1540504</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Regional Models of Cooperation: Regional Livability Plan</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1512352</link>
      <description><![CDATA[With AMPO, develop a Regional Livability Plan that covers economic development, housing, land use, and transportation.  It will also assess transportation choices, promote equitable and affordable housing, enhance economic competitiveness, support existing communities, coordinate polices and leverage investment, and value communities and neighborhoods.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 May 2018 11:49:51 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1512352</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Human Behavior</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1508674</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Projects that leverage advances in social sciences including psychology and economics for improving safety, reducing congestion and improving the livability of the nation's communities]]></description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 16 Apr 2018 12:15:13 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1508674</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>A GIS-based Performance Measurement System for Assessing Transportation Sustainability and Community Livability</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1302006</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Sustainability and livability in transportation, as the concepts referring to the capability to maintain the well being of transportation systems, have been widely accepted as the critical principles to quality of life and health of communities. Different from the traditional objectives that look at the short-term effects of planning and operation decisions, sustainability focuses on the productiveness and efficiency of transportation systems over time, and pay special attention on the linkages of transportation to economic competitiveness, social development and environmental protection. As the recognition of this critical role, the recent years have witnessed increasing efforts in developing guidelines and principles to incorporate sustainability and livability objectives into transportation decision making. Despite these efforts, it is often found challenging to apply them to transportation practices due to the lack of appropriate assessment tools for transforming these abstract concepts to quantitative metrics. In this context, this study is intended to develop a geographic information system (GIS) based performance measurement system to evaluate the effectiveness of transportation developments in meeting sustainability and livability goals. This system will take advantage of remote sensing technologies and transportation information systems, and integrate land use, transportation and socio-economic data to form an input database. Based on it, a comprehensive list of sustainability and livability performance measures will be suggested for different types of applications. The database, the data analysis modules and the resulting performance measures will be integrated to form a GIS-based prototype performance measurement system for New York State to monitor the health of transportation systems over space and time. The project team is uniquely qualified to conduct this study because it has all the expertise, management capabilities, critical skill set, and relevant project experience to meet and exceed the expectations of the University of Transportation Research Center (UTRC) Project Panel. The team will be led by Dr. Qian Wang who has extensive experience in performance measurement, land use modeling and travel demand forecasting. She will be responsible for the development of the GIS-based system and the team management. Dr. Le Wang, an expert on advanced remote sensing technologies and GIS, has extensive experience with remote sensing, data mining and forecasting of land use and cover changes in urban areas. Dr. Le Wang will therefore co-lead the tasks related to the remote sensing data processing and the development of the assessment database. The team will be rounded out by two highly motivated graduate students.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 01:00:39 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1302006</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Data Collection and Econometric Analysis of the Demand for Nonmotorized Transportation</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1258154</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Fostering sustainable mobility for secure and livable communities is key to address the current environmental and energy crises. There are successful examples of cities for which cycling is playing a major role in their paths toward sustainability. For example, 5.8% of commuters in Portland cycle to work. The percentage in New York City is only 0.6%, despite 345 miles of bicycle routes being added in the last decade. To encourage the use of non-motorized alternatives there is a  need to better understand the motives underlying demand. Econometric travel demand models are highly valuable for assessing the effect of policies and incentives seeking to reduce the indiscriminate use of car. In fact, forecasting demand using discrete choice models has proved to be successful in the case of modal split among motorized alternatives. However, there are several challenges in applying choice modeling to non-motorized options. Users of the transportation system may be motivated to cycle or walk not because of the tradeoff between cost and time, but because of health and environmental benefits of these alternatives. At the same time, there are several factors that may discourage the use of non-motorized transportation, such as poor accessibility, safety concerns, and unfavorable route and weather conditions. For instance, it is often argued that the North East has poor climate to encourage the use of biking. Accounting for factors beyond traditional compensatory attributes is not straightforward and requires a deep understanding of user behavior. This research project will focus on two related problems that are relevant for better informing policies targeting sustainable transportation as well as safer and more livable cities. The first research project is to derive a new latent segmentation approach to discrete demand to model non-motorized transportation choices and characterize both utilitarian and recreational cycling users. For this project, a survey instrument will be designed to collect stated-preference and attitudinal data to test new estimators. The second research project is to improve the analysis of cycling demand subject to weather conditions by building a new methodology to study and update time series of automatic cycling counts, which will be tested using case studies of 2 major cities in North America. Results of both projects are expected to contribute in the methodological and practical characterization of current and potential bicycle users, as well as to provide essential information capturing the motives and barriers associated with cycling decisions.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 02 Aug 2013 01:00:47 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1258154</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Effect of Low-Impact Sustainable Transportation Design as a Strategy for Alleviating Stormwater Runoff and Reducing GHG Emissions</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1250483</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Transportation networks typically have been designed for maximizing vehicular mobility without accounting for human accessibility or environmental considerations. However, a recent agreement between the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency signifies a shift in thinking towards a more integrated transportation design approach. The agreement recognizes that urban sprawl and impervious surfaces such as roadways, parking lots and sidewalks encourage environmental impacts by enhancing runoff and increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while discouraging sustainable, livable communities. In this proposed effort, we address the integrative goals of the DOT and EPA by examining the potential for low impact transportation design as an option to reduce sewage system costs and environmental GHG and nitrogen releases. Increased stormwater runoff not only generates unhealthy pollutant loads to urban streams, but also represents and increased energy demand on sewage treatment. Classic solutions to obtain a sustainable wastewater infrastructure are costly and disruptive to the transportation infrastructure. The objective of the proposed research is to assess green design alternatives to reduce transportation impacts on combined sewer loading and GHG emissions. "Green" low-impact transportation design strategies reduce runoff loading prior to generation and can also enhance community desirability, livability, and potentially property values. We propose an integrated approach that spanning multiple academic disciplines linking sustainable "green" transportation design principles with environmental implications with stakeholder input. Research will inform as to which design strategies to reduce CSOs and GHG emissions are most effective while maintaining transportation needs, which are preferred by various stakeholders, and how much stakeholders would be willing to pay for individual options.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2013 01:00:55 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1250483</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Making Freight-Centric Communities More Livable: Measuring the Impact of Advanced Technologies</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1234885</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Communities that attract or retain industrial viability are considered less livable, but reducing, limiting, or mitigating freight operations have direct, measurable economic impacts. This research will measure benefits of advanced technologies and practices to safely blend freight with passenger, transit, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic including Safe Routes to School.  These technologies could mitigate a community's safety, noise, and environmental concerns and accelerate implementation of improved practices. This research involves scenario-based analyses to evaluate quantifiable livability benefits of adopting these technologies. Advanced technologies such as intelligent transportation system ( ITS), intersection management, dynamic mobility, dynamic route guidance, and optimization will be reviewed for application suitability. As a case study, a selected subset of advanced ITS technologies will be applied in the Memphis area and evaluated for their sustainability, cost effectiveness, transferability to other regions, and safety impacts. National Center for Freight &amp; Infrastructure Research and Education (CFIRE) partner institutions bring different research experiences and strengths that coalesce in the proposed research including cutting-edge modeling approaches in simulating the behavior of many elements of the freight transportation system, designing ITS travel information systems, and using geographic information systems (GIS) and related information technologies. Additionally, the Federal Highway Administration has shown a strong interest in using Memphis as a test bed for evaluating the application of advanced technologies to improve the efficiency of freight movement in an urban environment.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:21:01 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1234885</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Using Simulations to Investigate Travel, Lifestyle, and Economic Issues in New Towns Designed with a Dual Transportation Infrastructure</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1233016</link>
      <description><![CDATA[This project proposes that it is possible to build communities that accommodate strong preferences for auto-mobility and single-family homes, yet at the same time are much safer and cleaner, more pleasant, and more socially integrated than conventional suburbs. We accomplish this with a dual transportation infrastructure: the complete separation of fast, heavy vehicles (FHVs) from low-speed, low-speed, lightweight modes (LLMs; less than 25 mph top speed and 500 kg curb weight) on a city-wide scale. In a draft report (Delucchi et al, 2002) we delineate our dual-road-system plan and discuss and analyze some of its impacts on transportation problems. The potential environmental, social, and community benefits of the plan are clear. However, for these benefits to be realized, people must choose to live in such planned communities and to buy and use LLMs. Because there are no communities like the one we propose, one must use simulations to begin to understand how people might react to our plan. We seek STC funding to design and administer "pilot" household interviews, focus groups, and other group interviews to investigate: i) effective ways to represent or simulate life and travel in our plan; ii) how people react to various aspects of the plan; iii) the implications of our initial findings for developing the plan to maximize its appeal to households, and iv) the practical problem of how to start to build such towns as we propose.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:49:20 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1233016</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Incorporating Livability into Rural and Small Metropolitan Transportation Planning</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1232032</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The National Association of Development Organizations (NADO) Research Foundation proposes to research the methodologies and extent to which livable community concepts are incorporated into rural and small metropolitan transportation planning processes. The research will identify mechanisms that rural and small metropolitan transportation planning organizations (typically referred to as RPO's or RTPO's) are implementing to incorporate the tenets of livable communities, while also working to meet the transportation needs of residents in these communities. Specifically, the research will assess the roles that RPOs are undertaking to incorporate the goals of U.S. Department of Transportation, Department of Housing and Urban Development and Environmental Protection Agency's Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities, such as promoting transportation choice, enhancing economic competitiveness and coordinating policies into their planning processes.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:30:42 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1232032</guid>
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