Research & Implementation - Houston

Texas A&M Transportation Institute
701 N. Post Oak Road
Suite 430
Houston, TX 77024
(713) 613-9213
[email protected]

Mr. Darrell W. Borchardt, P.E. of TTI’s Houston Urban office has over 43 years of experience in several areas of traffic and transportation engineering.  He has served as staff engineer on research projects evaluating freeway operations, ramp metering systems, arterial street systems, and high occupancy vehicle lanes.  While working at TTI's Houston office within the Research and Implementation Division, he has managed staff members in several areas of traffic engineering, project development, geographical information systems, automatic vehicle identification/location systems, and information processing/management/dissemination.  He has completed several reports and analyses on construction-related road user costs; this expertise was developed into a training course for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) staff throughout the State. 
Mr. Borchardt has been involved in hurricane evacuation planning for the Houston-Galveston region since 2004 and has attended local, state, or national hurricane conferences since 2005.  Mr. Borchardt has also led the transportation analysis on projects completed by TTI for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for extensive hurricane evacuation studies for coastal regions of Texas which also included evacuation zone development, vulnerability, and behavioral analyses.  His specific effort utilized the Real Time Evacuation Planning Model (RtePM) to estimate evacuation clearance times for the study areas.  Mr. Borchardt has also completed traffic operations review and data analysis for the Houston region to assess the impacts of Hurricane Rita (2005), Hurricane Ike (2008), and tropical storm Harvey (2017) flooding event to assess impacts and long-term road closures on regional mobility. 
In terms of traffic data analysis, he completes annual analyses of probe-based (Toll tag and Bluetooth data sources) travel time and speed data for the entire Houston region for Houston TranStar.  This includes the determination of region-wide annual delay values used to complete the benefit/cost analysis as presented in the Houston TranStar Annual Report.  Mr. Borchardt also completes an annual evaluation of regional travel times for performance measurement studies.  A recent focus is developing a set of traffic volumes for evacuation planning/evaluation for the Houston region.  He is presently serving as principal investigator of a state-wide study on safety and compliance of freeway truck lane restrictions; he previously managed a team of researchers to develop a set of guidelines for implementation of such restrictions.  Other areas of interest include pedestrian and vehicular operations/management for ferry systems, freight movement operations in ports, and special event traffic management/shuttle bus operations.