NJ Transportation Research Ideas Planning & Environment

Pilot study should be undertaken to look at the impacts of climate change on NJDOT's bridge assets in a watershed that includes riverine and tidal influences, and varying topography. The analysis should look at rainfall increases, based on the NJDEP's referenced Cornell model, and give NJDOT insight on the impacts to future flow increases anticipated in the context of studied FEMA streams. The precipitation increases... more »

In order to fit the ever increasing population into the same size areas, we have been growing our cities vertically for decades. However, we are still doing so based on the same old two dimensional zoning structure. We should modify the zoning laws to allow for vertical cities. Construct city high-rise buildings with multiple zones inside. So people can move from residential to commercial, to park, to school zones... more »

Problem:

Many factors prevent around the clock shared uses for privately constructed and owned parking areas that otherwise could meet demand for a variety of trip purposes with a lower overall demand for total square footage committed to asphalt. These include land use driven-parking policy requirements, market-driven development practices, single-point insurance and indemnification requirements, lack of community-level... more »

The state of New Jersey has a complex and interwoven roadway network that creates many areas needing maintenance. Although large swathes of areas are regularly maintained, often times there are small parcels or areas that are often forgotten or neglected for long periods. These areas wedged between ramps, under bridges, behind fences, or on a slope become breeding grounds for invasive plant species where the plant growth... more »

It seems that there are considerable air quality problems on our roads. The majority of our PM2.5 on roadways comes from wear on tires, brakes, and clutches, and these contain metals that have the ability to harm our lungs' immune response--particularly worrisome with the COVID-19 pandemic (Selley et al., 2020). Once airborne, these metal particles seem to be made more toxic as they are solubilized by acidic atmospheric... more »

Transportation models are used for predicting future traffic, especially in urban areas. Their traffic forecasts are applied to plan new infrastructures such as highways, bridges, new transit lines, and/or enhancing current public transportation modes. They use the specific areas' socio-economic data together with sample travel survey data to build a transportation model. The initially developed model usually is calibrated... more »