Cornell University researchers in Civil and Environmental Engineering and other disciplines are helping New York state address a broad range of transportation problems, from how to promote car pooling and optimizing highway maintenance management to how to get trains and freight trucks on coordinated schedules, and a host of other issues related to making transportation more efficient, safe and less costly.

The effort will make research results from universities and national laboratories and other institutions available to the New York State Department of Transportation. The three-year contract has an anticipated budget of $1 million per year.

"This is a win-win situation," said Arnim Meyburg, professor and chair of Cornell's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, who leads the effort. "New York state gets access to problem-solving skills in a very short time, and we can introduce practical issues into the academic community, providing opportunities for us to educate students using real world problems. NYSDOT is looking at the academic community as a think-tank for solving problems in the transportation area."

The Transportation Infrastructure Research Consortium, led by Cornell, will address critical issues identified by DOT by going to the institution that has that particular area of expertise, said Meyburg, who is principal investigator for the project. Administrator of the consortium is John Mbwana, Ph.D., visiting scientist in civil and environmental engineering. Mark Turnquist, professor of civil and environmental engineering, also played a key role in putting the consortium together.

Other members of the consortium are: Brookhaven National Laboratory, Calspan - University at Buffalo Research Center, City University of New York, New York University, Polytechnic University and the State University of New York campuses at Stony Brook, Buffalo, Maritime College and at the Rockefeller Institute.

The consortium will address six major areas: engineering, operations, public transportation and planning, management and finance, public policy and human resources. In addition to expertise in the College of Engineering and the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Cornell will tap experts in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Agricultural and Biological Engineering, City and Regional Planning and in Economics.

"At the engineering end, we will address all the infrastructure aspects that are relevant to accommodate people, commodities and vehicles," Meyburg said. "That could be roads, airports, bridges, bicycle paths or canals. We will provide insight into all the hardware and software that support our ability to move people and commodities safely, efficiently and reliably around the state. That can include how to prevent corrosion of bridges, to what kind of road surface treatment should be applied and how to make trains run on time."

Transportation operations include such items as intelligent transportation systems, automatic toll collection devices and driver information systems. "For example, manual toll collection on toll facilities, such as bridges, tunnels and roads, reduces the performance of these facilities to levels substantially below their design capacity. New technology and revised operating strategies can address that problem," Meyburg said.

Another area of operations research: how to use the existing infrastructure to run the transportation system more efficiently.

"Efficient scheduling of vehicles, fleets and trains is absolutely essential," Meyburg said. "You have to coordinate trucking with the railroads and other transportation modes. Freight vehicles have to be available when the trains pull in, or the commodities can't be transported. Then the roads have to be clear -- no congestion -- for the trucks to get through. And people still have to get to work. It's a problem of enormous magnitude, particularly because of the peaking phenomenon (known as 'rush hour')." One simple solution to urban peak-period congestion: just double the number of vehicle occupants, from an average of 1.1 to two, in commuting cars. "If you increase vehicle occupancy from 1.1 to two, the average number of occupants in vehicles during peak demand periods, you would have little congestion! It's just a simple policy and behavior matter. But how do you achieve the required change in behavior?" Meyburg said.

A separate NYSDOT study in Syracuse by Meyburg and Linda Nozick, Cornell assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, will determine just that: How to get people to use HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes during peak periods. "We have to identify areas of congestion and superimpose alternative ways of operating. The goal is to develop techniques to transfer to urban areas all over the country. The question is, how do we deal with efficiency, including energy and environmental impact, when we're not going to build more highways?"