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    <title>Research in Progress (RIP)</title>
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    <language>en-us</language>
    <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>
    <image>
      <title>Research in Progress (RIP)</title>
      <url>https://rip.trb.org/Images/PageHeader-wTitle-RIP.jpg</url>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/</link>
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    <item>
      <title>Road charging for online retailers</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2250736</link>
      <description><![CDATA[This research project will investigate a socially responsible model for road charging for Online Merchandise Delivery Vehicles (OMDVs). This concept is planned to be achieved through a ‘cost and reward’ traffic control priority system. The methodology will first develop the ‘right formula’ to charge extra fees for OMDVs, which will be implemented as a traffic control priority at signalized intersections and other relevant parts of the urban intersection. Then, such policy-based priority decision support system will be tested under several policy and traffic demand and multimodal use scenarios. It is expected that the results will be able to show a right trade off between priority given to OMDVs and the extracted fees which can be utilized to improve road infrastructure. The results of this research are expected to be disseminated at various professional and scientific events both nationally and internationally. Also, the technology transfer will be sought with the most relevant industry partners while educational benefits will be achieved through training of PhD scholars.  ]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 21 Sep 2023 14:53:45 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/2250736</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Transitioning Fuel Tax Assessments to a Road Usage Charge</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1707230</link>
      <description><![CDATA[State departments of transportation (DOTs) and other transportation agencies are interested in determining a viable alternative to motor fuel taxes as the primary funding source for transportation. While motor fuel taxes served as an effective and efficient revenue source during much of the 20th century, automobile and truck fuel efficiency is improving and electric and hybrid vehicle registrations are growing rapidly, thus eroding the funding base.
Many possible paths for implementation exist for implementing road usage charging.  Some implementation strategies will require new and emerging technologies to administer road usage charge programs for passenger and commercial vehicles. These technologies, which in some cases are still evolving, have implications for revenue collection, revenue distribution across jurisdictions, enforcement, administrative efficiency, equity, privacy, and data security. Implementation of appropriate technologies and administrative protocols necessitates many considerations and presents challenges.   
Challenges related to political and public acceptance of road usage charging cannot be overstated. Implementation will require effective communication and education at many levels. The public and policy makers must see proposed changes in transportation funding as fair, transparent, and equitable because the charges will be borne across all social and economic parts of society. 
The objective of this research is to evaluate and present viable paths and strategies for implementing road usage charging at the state, multi-state, and regional levels that generate revenues that could supplement, and/or may ultimately replace, motor fuel taxes as the primary funding source for surface transportation. The research should consider the differences among states and the near- and longer-term considerations and challenges to changes in transportation funding. 

]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2020 16:42:07 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1707230</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Consumer Response to Road Pricing: Macro and Micro Modeling Tools for Socioeconomic Evaluation and Pricing of Managed Lanes</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1474431</link>
      <description><![CDATA[This study of the metropolitan Atlanta I-85 Express Lanes employs trip characteristics, facility operating conditions, and household demographics to provide a comprehensive overview of Express Lane users and their decision-making processes. The results are used to create a socioeconomic impact assessment tool at the macroscopic level and, at the microscopic level, a demand-modeling tool that can examine the response of consumers to different toll levels as a function of facility operating conditions and user demographics for forthcoming Express Lane implementations. The resulting applications will use the abundant data generated by the Express Lanes to impact current and future decision making.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 14 Jul 2017 13:10:05 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1474431</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Experimental Studies of Traffic Incident Management with Pricing, Private 
Information, and Diverse Subjects</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1458285</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The effective management of traffic incidents and other irregular disruptions on roadways is key to minimizing travel delay and improving the quality of life for urban residents and businesses. This project is currently using economic experiments involving human subjects and a networked, realistic driving simulation to study driver behavior in response to information displayed by variable message systems and to dynamic road pricing schemes. Based on existing results, the project will propose four new extensions to this study: the addition of more realistic driving mechanics to test driver responses to the projects treatments under increased cognitive load, the recruitment of subjects outside the University of California, Irvine (UCI) student body to confirm the validity of the results with different demographic groups, the implementation of treatments to study the impact of private information messaging systems (e.g. Waze, Google Maps, etc.), and the implementation of treatments to study a novel value-of-time based auction system for toll lane pricing and allocation. Improvements to the driving realism and the representativeness of the projects experimental subject pool will strengthen the robustness and validity of this study’s results, while the investigation of private information messaging and value-of-time auction scenarios will shed light on their potential for improving transportation management.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Mar 2017 16:39:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1458285</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Regional Financing Options Study</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1378072</link>
      <description><![CDATA[New York City and the surrounding counties of the metro region has arguably the most extensive and complex transportation system in the United States. This region has almost every type of transport system and mode of travel, with massive passenger and freight movement across and into the region. Further, this region continues to grow and change while retaining a core base of infrastructure and economic activity that is based on historical development patterns and land use. With that said, the region struggles to find the financial resources to maintain this infrastructure and improve it to meet the needs of the region for the next century.

The authors will explore various alternative traveler-based fees that can supplement the exiting revenue sources that currently provide the core financing for transportation infrastructure and operations. The New York Metro region already leads the country in terms of alternative financing mechanism for transport including significant use of road pricing (tolls) to fund mass transit services. Yet with a high level of mass transit use, the New York State has the lowest annual per capita vehicle miles traveled (VMT) of any state. Therefore, the fuel tax revenue which forms the core of transportation funding sources around the Nation produces far less revenue on a per person basis in New York State and as such our fuel tax funding sources fall far short of transportation system needs.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 27 Dec 2015 12:22:43 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1378072</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Behavioral Study for Managed Lane Pricing with Refund Option</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1367909</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The proposed study is a component of the principal investigator's (PI's) ongoing research effort to explore innovative pricing strategies for priced managed lanes (MLs).  The objective of this project is to investigate travelers' reactions to a possible refund option of priced MLs.  The investigation will focus on (1) gauging general interest and concerns regarding this concept, (2) eliciting travelers' choices of managed lane usage and refund claims under various situations, and (3) identifying and evaluating potential models to describe such choice behaviors. A stated preference (SP) survey will be developed and deployed in this project to collect relevant data.  Simple descriptive analysis will first be performed to gain insights to the dataset.  Choice behavior models in various fields and domains, including transportation, economics, insurance, and retail marketing, will be explored.  Model fitting will be performed on selected models. The type of this project is basic research.  It investigates a plausible future scenario where a refund option is provided to managed lane (ML) users.  In the past four years, the number of priced ML facilities in the U.S. have rapidly increased from 6 to 17.  However, refund option is not currently in practice.  The goal of this research is to address the challenge of developing innovative pricing strategies to support ML goals that range from operational efficiency to social benefits and public acceptance. Expected direct outcomes of this project include (1) a well-designed survey, (2) a rich dataset, (3) a comprehensive survey of choice models across various fields and domains, and (4) a set of fitted models for priced MLs with refund option.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2015 01:00:34 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1367909</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Towards Socially and Economically Sustainable Urban Developments</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1246920</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The objective of this research is to investigate the effects of road pricing plan, land-use policy and investments on transportation infrastructure on urbanized region and to help select the appropriate policies that foster socially and economically sustainable urban development. Most current road pricing research and practice have focused on the function of road pricing to manage congestion and to raise revenue. However, little is known about the effects of road pricing and land-use policies on the sustainability of an area over time. This can raise enormous concerns with respect to social equity and the political acceptability of policies among motorists, researchers, policy makers and urban economic entities. This project aims to construct an scenario based integrated transport land use model to investigate how road pricing policies and revenue-based local investments affect the efficiency of transportation systems and equitable and sustainable developments of urban or suburban communities focusing on the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metropolitan region. Among three constituent parts of sustainable development that are environmental protection, economic development, and social development, this project contributes to improving economic and social sustainability in terms of modeling initiative. This project will mainly deliver methodologies and tools that facilitate the design and implementation of sustainability-oriented policies. In particular, this project will, for the first time, initiate a spatially disaggregate PECAS type transportation land-use model combined with travel demand models to forecast and evaluate the impact of road pricing for the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metropolitan region. The results of this research will advance our understanding on how policy decisions for vehicular networks and urban land-use affect the entire economy of the region and the sustainability of its local communities. This research will provide researchers, regional planning communities, and policymakers with new modeling, algorithmic and simulation foundations to address the equity and sustainability concerns from the general public. Since this research will be verified and tested with a real-world case involving Buffalo-Niagara Falls metropolitan region, the results will have considerable potential to be applied in practical planning. The research findings will be disseminated via journal articles and conference presentations.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 03 Apr 2013 01:01:14 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1246920</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Dynamic Congestion Pricing Considering Spatial Interactions of Queues</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1236717</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Road pricing has been studied extensively by transportation scientists and economists ever since Arthus Pigou first suggested the idea in 1920's. Vickery's landmark study using the bottleneck model advanced road pricing analysis to a dynamic regime where individuals' departure times are endogenized, hence the optimum tolls charged vary over time. Although the simple, elegant bottleneck model adopted by Vickery enables a wealth of policy/economic insights of the urban congestion problem to be obtained, its treatment of vehicular queues as point queues makes its applicability to general networks questionable. Specifically, the propagation of congestion is ignored in the bottleneck model. As such, congestion is localized within a link and the so-called queue spill-back is overlooked. With the help of a simple diverge, we find that allowing queue spill-back in flow dynamics could produce equilibrium solutions and optimal tolls far different from those predicted by the bottleneck model. We hypothesize that using a realistic dynamic flow model may significantly alter the policy implications and welfare effects of time-varying toll derived from the basic bottleneck model. In the proposed research, we plan to test our hypothesis by exploring dynamic congestion pricing on a wide variety of simple yet general networks with a more realistic traffic flow model. To achieve this objective, we will formulate, solve and analyze the dynamic congestion pricing problem via traffic equilibrium analysis and network optimization, and discuss the policy implications of our research findings.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:51:49 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1236717</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>The Optimal Coarse Toll for Heterogeneous Commuters in the Morning Commute</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1236265</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The theory of first-best congestion pricing tells us that a time-dependent toll can be used to eliminate congestion in the morning commute problem for identical commuters in a corridor with a single bottleneck. In reality, however, it is often impractical to implement such a fine-gained toll because it would require too frequent changes of the toll. This research investigates a coarse-grained, second best tolling scheme in which a flat toll is collected during a particular time period in the morning peak. In this scheme, both the toll and its duration are subject to optimization. The research will first find the commuter departure profiles under this coarse tolling scheme for identical commuters, then for heterogeneous commuters who have different values of time. Based on these profiles, we will find the optimal toll levels and durations for both identical and heterogeneous commuters, and investigate the efficiency loss of these tolls as compared with the first-best toll, and whether these toll schemes actually benefit every traveler group (pareto-improving). Although such a tolling scheme cannot completely eliminate congestion, it is much easier to implement, and the tools developed in our study can help quantify the benefits derived from this toll scheme.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:44:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1236265</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Operation of the Transportation Secure Data Center</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1234797</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The Department of Energy (DOE) shall operate the Transportation Secure Data Center (TSDC). The TSDC shall preserve data that has already been collected and secure it in a protected environment while also making it accessible in a manner that maintains survey respondent anonymity.  Datasets already incorporated into the TSDC include those from value pricing projects and from household travel surveys that have included a Global Positioning System (GPS) component. DOE shall also examine other datasets, including those related to safety, reliability, and probe vehicle studies, for addition into the TSDC. Researchers have requested other data sets be considered for inclusion, such as the 2009 National Household Travel Survey add-on datasets with home, work and destination block geocoding and the voluntarily uploaded public GPS traces on www.openstreetmap.org. The objective of the TSDC and of this agreement is to prevent these valuable datasets from becoming lost or destroyed (as significant public funding went into collecting them) and to make the data available for legitimate research while at the same time safeguarding participant privacy.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:19:29 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1234797</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Coaster Station Smart Parking Pilot Project</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1234319</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Inefficient use of and access to parking at rail and transit stations contribute to highway congestion and suboptimal use of rail and transit systems. For example, parking problems are faced by COASTER, Metrolink, BART, and CalTrain. The scope of work describes all of the high-level tasks that would be needed to carry out Phase 1 (Feasibility Assessment) and Phase 2 (Pre-Implementation), including preliminary engineering and development of the project plans, monitoring, and evaluation tasks leaning up toward implementation of the Smart Parking-Pricing Pilot Project (Phase 3). Broad approximation for the deployment phase tasks are also included but may change depending on outcomes from Phases 1 and 2. In this work plan, key strategies, underlying support policies, and technologies will be examined and developed to address the complex operational requirements of the proposed Pilot Project. Selected for the Value Pricing Pilot Program (VPP) award, the Smart Parking-Pricing Pilot Project will be developed following the two-phase, systems engineering process to maximize the quality of the developed parking-pricing system. This is to ensure that the deployed system adequately meets the needs and objectives envisioned by Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), SANDAG, Caltrans, and other partners (in accordance with US DOT Final Rule, Park 940-Intelligent Transportation System Architecture and Standards Section 940.11-Project Implementation).]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:10:25 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1234319</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Departure Time Choice Model in the Presence of Time-of-Day Toll Pricing</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1231919</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Express Toll Lanes (ETL) initiative is Maryland's statewide initiative aimed to provide cost-effective way for congestion management including toll pricing and managed lanes. As a consequence, this initiative is expected to implement toll pricing on major Maryland's corridor including the Intercounty Connector (ICC), the capital beltway (I-495), and the I-95. One of the pricing schemes considered by the initiative is the time-of-day toll pricing scheme where toll price is adjusted in correspondence to the time of day or on the basis of the traffic conditions. This pricing scheme is gaining attention as a travel demand management strategy by providing incentive to travelers with more flexible departure time to travel during off peak period, thereby shifting peak travel demand. Meanwhile, travel demand model that forecasts the time when trips are taken need to be developed. Modeling departure time is essential for policy makers evaluating travel demand management alternatives, such as time-of-day toll pricing. Different toll prices by time of day induce traveler to perceive departure time choice similar to the mode choice selection. This modeling framework is challenging for analysts. First, the choice of departure time has to be identified or approximated either by simulation or by means of stated preference survey. Next, the interdependency of departure time choice and mode choice has to be carefully examined. The traditional approaches dealing with time of day estimate time of day factors (TODF) from observed data and assume that the same behavior will pertain in the future; this technique is used to estimate traffic volume by time period using the TODF. The newer methodologies such as "Peak Spreading" improve the limitation of TODF approach by accounting for the excess demand in certain corridors during the peak period and allow for more realistic assessment of travel condition in the future. However, peak spreading approach has relatively weak behavioral foundation and cannot fully address travel response to system changes; for instance, it cannot be used to fully analyze policy changes or the effects of travel demand management actions. The departure time choice, on the other hand enable analyst to assess the extent to which travelers respond to congestion at disaggregate level. Despite the widespread interest in the concept of departure time choice, there is very little empirical study on the impact of departure time choice in the presence of time-of-day toll pricing (especially in Maryland). This project proposes an empirical study that integrates the joint effects of departure time and mode choice. We will consider variables affecting departure time such as travel time, travel cost, travel time reliability and activity duration. The presence of time-of-day toll pricing will be taken into account in the model estimation process to develop a model that represents behavioral responses to pricing. Possible response of traveler to pricing in term of mode shift and departure time shift will be carefully examined. The extent to which the model could aid local agencies to achieve several objectives including toll revenue, system performance, and environmental impact will be examined.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:28:36 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1231919</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>A Comprehensive Approach for Evaluating Value Pricing and Innovative Financing Policies</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1231918</link>
      <description><![CDATA[This project will develop a comprehensive quantitative approach for evaluating the impact of value pricing and innovative financing policies on transportation system performance, considering both the revenue generation and reinvestment stages (hence the word "comprehensive" in the project title). System performance measures include efficiency (e.g. delay, travel time), equity (e.g. distributional effects on various income groups), and sustainability (e.g. fuel consumption, emissions). This research will achieve the research objectives by answering the following specific questions: How is transportation revenue (fuel tax revenue, toll revenue etc.) currently invested by various authorities? What are the impacts of value pricing and innovative financing policies on transportation system performance and various user groups in the long run, under the existing investment process? How about under alternative investment processes (e.g. revenue dedicated to highway capacity expansion, or more revenue invested on transit, or direct compensation to certain user groups)? How will the consideration of user benefits from revenue reinvestment influence the evaluation results? How can findings from this research be incorporated into policy debates on congestion pricing, transportation revenue generation, and transportation investment?]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:28:35 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1231918</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Stochastic System Optimum and Its Applications</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1230842</link>
      <description><![CDATA[It has been long recognized that to minimize the system total travel cost is one of the major objectives for transport managers. Meanwhile, from a traveler's perspective, her objective is to reduce her own travel cost as much as possible; therefore, the deterministic user equilibrium is widely assumed to model a traveler's rational route choice behavior. A bi-level programming formulation has been proposed for some transportation problems such as the network design problem and the (second-best) road pricing problem. In a bi-level formulation, the upper level is to minimize the system total cost and the lower level is to solve the corresponding parametric deterministic user equilibrium, where the parameter might stand for toll charge or the road capacity expansion. The lower level deterministic user equilibrium, however, ignores a traveler's stochastic route choice behavior and the stochastic nature of traffic flow pattern. Indeed, the significant amount of variation of traffic flow pattern has been observed in both traffic count field data and commuter's route choice lab experiment. Therefore, it should be more appropriate to model the traffic flow pattern in the lower level as a flow probability distribution on the flow space, rather than single deterministic equilibrium. Since traffic link (route) flow should be modeled as a random vector, the system total cost should be regarded as a random variable. Hence the stochastic system optimum (SSO) problem is defined to solve the mean and variance optimization problem of the random system total travel cost. This research aims at reformulating the SSO bi-level problem in such a way that in the lower level the traffic flow follows a stationary distribution in a Markov chain of driver's day-to-day stochastic route choice adjustment process, and the upper level is to solve the mean and variance optimization of the system total cost. Given any toll charge pattern or road capacity expansion condition, an efficient algorithm is expected to be developed to solve the first- and second- order moments of the route flow stationary distribution in the lower level. Furthermore, an iterative method will be proposed to solve the upper level SSO problem. The completion of this research will provide new insight in solving the more realistic stochastic version of the network design and road pricing problems, which in turn benefit both academic literature and practical applications in the New York Metropolitan area.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:07:17 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1230842</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Prioritizing Highway Construction: Case Study in Virginia</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1230067</link>
      <description><![CDATA[This project proposes a methodology for prioritizing the addition of interstate highway lanes, using Virginia as a case study. The methodology uses shadow road user pricing, based on actual road user pricing elsewhere in the United States and adjusted for road segment length and average income in the surrounding region. A final report is available.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 13:53:28 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1230067</guid>
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