Abstract:
Transportation engineers and planners need a new set of tools to help ensure they are getting the best value and use of limited transportation monies. Agency officials have historically relied on various performance evaluation methods to assess roadway networks that have inherent limitations, which may not completely identify true causes and contributors of congestion. Through application of existing technology and off-the-shelf tools, Jacobs Engineering Group has developed and applied an integrated system to evaluate congestion on regional networks, evaluate pavement roughness, estimate emissions, recommend mitigation measures, prioritize improvements, and update transportation travel demand model networks. The network conditions are evaluated using an invehicle setup including a PDA data collector, differentially correctable global positioning system (GPS) pavement sensor, and geo-referenced digital video system. Components of this approach has been successfully applied on over 400,000 miles of roadways for various scales of communities across the country including: Hidalgo County (McAllen TX), Savannah GA, Harlingen TX, Corpus Christi TX, Birmingham AL, Columbia SC, Phoenix AZ, Nashville TN, Oakland CA, Dallas TX, Denver CO, Tucson AZ, San Francisco CA, Los Angeles CA, Atlanta, GA, and Tampa, FL.
