SGER: Responding to the Unexpected: Understanding Travelers' Behavioral Choices in the Wake of the MS River Bridge Collapse
Principal Investigator:
Henry Liu, Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering
Co-Investigators:
- Kathleen Harder, Senior Research Associate, College of Design
- David Levinson, Associate Professor, Civil Engineering
Project Summary:
This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project aims to collect perishable traffic data in the wake of the collapse of the Interstate Highway 35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in order to understand travelers' behavioral choices and how traffic evolves from a disequilibrium state to potential equilibria. The recent bridge collapse resulted in immediate loss of life and also in serious consequences for mobility and accessibility in the Twin Cities metropolitan region. Under such a severe network disruption, the traffic equilibrium has been disturbed and travelers need to learn new traffic patterns; eventually network traffic may evolve into a new equilibrium, or may remain in a disordered state. Understanding the transition and learning processes of travelers' behavioral responses are essential to effective traffic management after network disruption and for long-term transportation planning. Both aggregated highway traffic data and disaggregated traveler behavioral choice data will be collected. Because the traffic pattern is evolving in a day-to-day context and it becomes more and more difficult for travelers to recall their choices as time passes, the quality of data collection fades over time. Therefore, it is essential that data collection efforts be initiated immediately.
Sponsor:
Project Details:
- Start date: 09/2007
- Project Status: Completed
- Research Area: Transportation Safety and Traffic Flow
- Topics: Bridges and Structures , Driver Performance and Behavior