CE 56100 – Transportation Systems Evaluation

Credits and contact hours:

  • 3 credits
  • Lecture meets 2 times per week for 75 minutes per meeting for 15 weeks

Specific course information:

  • Catalog description: Concepts and principles of transportation economic analysis, transportation costs and benefits, user and nonuser consequences, needs studies, finance and taxation, methods of evaluation of plans and projects, cost-effectiveness, environmental impact assessment.
  • Prerequisites: Graduate standing or CE 36100 or equivalent with minimum Grade of D-
  • Course status: Technical elective course

Specific Goals for the course:

  • Student learning outcomes - Upon successful completion of this course the student shall be able to:
    • Define transportation system goals, objectives, and performance measures
    • Define and classify impacts of transportation systems
    • Estimate transportation demand and supply
    • Calculate agency, user and non-user costs
    • Conduct economic efficiency, economic impact and environmental impact analyses
    • Apply multicriteria analyses and transportation programming techniques
  •  Relationship of course to program outcomes
    • Outcome 1: An ability to identify, formulate, and solve complex engineering problems by applying principles of engineering, science, and mathematics.
    • Outcome 4: An ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts.
    • Outcome 5: An ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives.

Topics:

  • PRINCIPLES OF TRANSPORTATION DECISION-MAKING
    • Steps in transportation program development process, transportation systems evaluation procedure, U.S. Legislation affecting transportation decisions
  • PERFORMANCE MEASURES
    • Properties of a good performance measure, examples of performance measures by mode and level of analysis.
  • TRANSPORTATION DEMAND
    • Measures of transportation demand and supply, transportation demand and supply curves, elasticity of demand, consumer surplus, latent demand.
  • TRANSPORTATION COSTS
    • Agency, user and non-user costs; average and marginal cost, elasticity of supply, economy/diseconomy of scale, cost functions, pricing.
  • TRAVEL TIME IMPACTS
    • In-vehicle and out-of-vehicle travel time, value of travel time, travel time reliability, revealed versus stated preference surveys, marginal rate of substitution.
  • SAFETY IMPACTS
    • Measures of traffic safety, safety countermeasures, crash modification and reduction factors, regression to the mean phenomenon, safety impact evaluation.
  • VEHICLE OPERATION COSTS (VOC) IMPACTS
    • VOC components, factors affecting VOC, VOC data sources, VOC models and tools.
  • ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY IMPACTS
    • Cash flow diagrams, equivalence equations, nominal and effective interest rate, criteria for economic efficiency evaluation, life cycle cost analysis.
  • ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (ED) IMPACTS
    • ED impact types, ED performance measures, economic multipliers, input-output analysis, economic simulation models.
  • AIR QUALITY IMPACTS
    • Criteria air pollutants, greenhouse gases, on-road mobile source emissions, attainment and non-attainment areas, factors affecting emissions/emission rate, air quality legislation and regulations, approaches and tools for measuring emissions, dispersion and concentration.
  • NOISE IMPACTS
    • Sources of transportation noise, sound pressure level and frequency, noise duration, reference energy mean noise emission level, traffic noise modeling, traffic noise mitigation measures, noise barrier cost estimation.
  • IMPACTS ON ENERGY USE
    • Energy sources and sinks, energy consumption and intensity, fuel economy regulations, tools used to estimate energy consumption and impacts.
  • LAND USE IMPACTS
    • Transportation-land use relationship, direct and indirect land use impacts, land use elasticity, allocation rules, gravity model, land use impact tools and legislation.
  • TECHNIQUES TO SUPPORT DECISION-MAKING
    • Multiple criteria analysis, Delphi technique, uncertainty and risk analyses, trade-off analysis, goal programming.