Risk-Cost Benefit Analysis for Access Reconfiguration of Transportation Networks

The design and operations of surface transportation will be subject to major rising trends, including autonomous vehicles, economic development, and advanced logistics systems. Among the known remedies, access management is used to control vehicular ingress and egress to adjacent property, where the main goal is to preserve the safety and capacity of the transportation network. While access management can assist in protecting billions of dollars in current investments in the transportation infrastructure, it is typical for transportation planners to have limited resources, including budgets, equipment, time, human resources, and others. Thus, planners need principled approaches for allocating their limited resources across a large network of highways. This dissertation contributes to the transportation planning field by developing a decision-aiding framework that can be used to screen and prioritize competing needs for access management among many thousands of access points, where additional data elicitation and modeling can justify access management projects that are focused on safety improvement and travel time delay reductions. The developed framework is demonstrated by applying it to thousands of access points located on major routes across the state of Virginia. This framework ought to be of wide interest to planners, stakeholders, analysts, and policymakers who have limited resources and rely on heterogeneous data in their decision making, and it is applicable to multi-scale systems in various fields.