Comprehensive Highway Corridor Planning With Sustainability Indicators

Abstract

This thesis develops a Model Of Sustainability and Integrated Corridors (MOSAIC) to select the best program-level plans for corridors within Maryland by estimating the sustainability impact of multimodal highway improvement options early in the transportation planning and environmental screening processes with minimum requirements on staff time and other resources. Six categories of sustainability indicators (mobility, safety, socio-economic impact, natural resources, energy and emissions, and cost) and more than thirty sustainability performance measures have been defined as evaluation criteria for the selection of highway corridor improvement options. Currently, MOSAIC considers the no-build case and two highway improvement options, including adding a general-purpose lane and converting at-grade intersections to grade-separated interchanges. Mode choice model has also been introduced for future study on multimodal improvement types. MOSAIC has been applied to the US 15 and I 270 corridors, thus demonstrating the feasibility and usefulness of this comprehensive tool for sustainable highway corridor planning.