Congratulations to the Transportation and Logistics students from North Dakota
 State University presenting their research at the 59th Annual Transportation Research Forum (TRF). This year the forum will be held in partnership with the University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies at the historic Coffman Memorial Union. Every year transportation professionals get together to discuss the emerging issues in transportation.
To learn more about TRF and attending the Forum tr
avel to
their website.
NDSU students attending and their research:
Mohammad Alshareef
Title: The Value of Missouri River Water in its Navigation Channel and Freight Costs
Abstract: Missouri River is the longest river in North America with 3,767 km. Agriculture commodities are the most critical goods move on the river. The history of climate change which lowers the river efficiency made the river unreliable for stockholders. Finding other transportation modes become more important. Trucks are a good mode to transport for short distances. The analysis indicates that rail is the best alternative transportation mode to transport agricultural products to the Gulf of Mexico through New Orleans, LA, and Galveston, TX. With limited data, a positive cost to agricultural freight was shown in one year of a five years' dry period. In four years, rail rates were estimated to be lower than barge rates. This cost comparison corresponds to the gradual decrease in the use of the Missouri River shipping channel for agricultural commodities.
Narendra Malalgoda
Title: Effect of Subsidies on Urban Public Transit Performance and Ridership in the U.S.
Abstract:
This paper assesses the impact of government subsidies on transit ridership within a stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) based framework. Using a panel of the 57 largest transit agencies ranked by unlinked passenger trips and passenger miles in the U.S. during the years of 2008-2014, we examine the effects of government subsidies and ride-hailing services on public transit. The transit data for this research were obtained from the National Transit Database (NTD) maintained by the Federal Transit Administration. We found that, although subsidies lower transit fares, the effect of subsidies on ridership was insignificant. We also observed that Uber had a weak negative effect on transit ridership.
Fecri Karanki
Co-Authored:
Siew Hoon Lim
Title:
Nested Catchment Areas and Breaking Monopolistic Power
Abstract:
In recent years, airport competition has been addressed in the literature, although U.S.-based research is lacking.
However, if any privatization trend occurs in the U.S. as have occurred in Europe in recent decades, competition among U.S. airports would be severe.
Even though there is no privatization trend in the U.S. at the moment, since deregulation in 1978, we can observe competition signals among neighboring and substituting airports due to the effect of airline competition.
Thus, this study proposes a model showing how airports can gain competitive advantages against one another in multidimensional product space.
Because the location of airports is exogenous, strategies to increase attractiveness of airports will be airfare and service quality.
We also argue that a smaller airport that nests in a primary airport's natural catchment area has the potential to undermine the monopolistic power of the larger airport.
Our model results are compared with empirical data using GIS methodology for robustness.
Yuan Xu
Title: Evaluating Environmental Efficiency of U.S Airline Industry with Flight Delays Using a Directional Distance Function DEA
Abstract: Air transportation plays an important role in the U.S. In 2017, U.S domestic airlines served 497.95 million passengers and 15.1 billion pounds of freight . Airlines, like the other fossil-fuel-based transport, release air pollutants (i.e. carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides), even though at a relatively small portion. However, with the rapid growth of air travel in recent years, there is a dramatic increase in total pollution attributable to aviation.To mitigate the potential risks driven by environmental issues, many airlines have committed to the set of three industry-wide greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals established by IATA: (1) a 1.5% per year increase in fuel efficiency until 2020; (2) carbon-neutral growth from 2020 and (3) a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 compared to 2005. Therefore, it is important to construct a model to evaluate the environmental performance of the U.S airlines over years. This paper develops a directional distance function DEA model to evaluate the environmental efficiency of 12 U.S airlines from 2013 to 2016 with consideration of desirable and undesirable outputs (i.e. flight delays). Input variables considered are employment, operating expense and fuel consumption. Regarding the outputs, revenue passenger-mile are considered as desirable, while flight delays and GHG emissions are taken as undesirable outputs.
Mingwei Guo
Title: Administrative Process Insight for Effective Impaired Driver Interventions
Abstract: In North Dakota, impaired driving is a severe problem in public safety. In many cases, impaired driving is alcohol related. The state has legislated several treatment and evaluation program option for DUI offenders. A compulsory completion of an addiction evaluation is required for each driver convicted of a DUI. The evaluation is used to determine if and what treatment is needed. These findings must be presented to the NDDOT as part of the process for restoring driver license privileges. A subsequent form is filed to indicate treatment completion in cases where the counselor has recommended an alcohol education or/and treatment program. Eight regions are formed by North Dakota Department of Human Services Behavioral Health Division to better serve the goal, yet research has been slow in terms of improving and idealizing these programs. Based on data from evaluations, DUI convictions, citations, crashes and treatment program data, this research has explored elements that are associated with the effectiveness of impaired driver treatment programs and positive public safety outcomes.
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