1992 Transportation Engineering Research Reports (SWUTC/94/712410-5)

The engineering research reports in this document resulted from the third year of the Undergraduate Transportation Engineering Fellows Program during the summer of 1992. The ten-week program, sponsored by the Advanced Institute program of the Southwest Region University Transportation Center (SWUTC), the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), and the Civil Engineering Department at Texas A&M University, provides undergraduate students in Civil Engineering with the opportunity to learn more about transportation engineering through participation in a transportation research program. The program design allows the students to interact directly with a faculty member or TTI researcher in developing a research proposal, conducting appropriate research, and documenting the research results.|This compendium contains reports on a wide variety of transportation research. Reports on transportation operations covered such current issues as analysis of the performance of vehicle detectors; incident detection using travel time information; effects of light rail transit being located in an arterial street system; and, and evaluation of the traffic operations at exit lane drops. Planning issues were addressed in reports on comparisons of observed and theoretical trip length frequency; the driver behavior impacts of freeway reconstruction; and investigation of the relationship between congestion and air quality; and, analysis of the Houston Metro electronic information system. Research in the field of materials produced reports on lime stabilization of roadway subbase and microscopic analysis of fiber modified asphalt concrete. Driver and safety research is reflected in reports on mental workload in highway work zones, the effects of vehicle and road type in ran-off-road crashes, and the determination of driver capability in the detection and recognition of objects.