In 1999, The New York City Transit’s (NYCT) Department of Capital Program Management achieved ISO14001 certification- Environmental Management Systems. Today, sustainable design is an integral part of all design, construction, procurement and operations and maintenance activities. This paper outlines NYC Transit’s adoption of sustainable business practices which exposed significant opportunities to reduce the impact to ecologies. These practices encompass high-performance building designs, renewable energy applications, conservation of energy, water and natural resources, waste reduction, recycling and reuse, environmentally responsible procurement and total life cycle analysis. A cause-and-effect benefit is then demonstrated for many of these sustainable practices encompassing both local and geographically distant ecologies. Some examples include the inadvertent procurement of Azobe (an unsustainably over-harvested tropical hardwood from Africa) used as rail ties in the design and construction of rail tracks; the demand for large quantities of energy to move rolling stocks, contributing to toxic emissions fallout from regional power plants; the contribution to poor ambient air quality as a result of non-regulated off-road diesel equipment emission from construction sites. In recognition of the need to reduce our ecological footprint, NYCT took upon itself a proactive role to establish a rigorous environmental management program and to identify, control and reduce those activities that lead up to “behind the scene” ecological impacts.
This report describes a simulation model developed to evaluate the impact of using Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) for bus tracking, on controlling buses in wide-area transit networks. Control strategies with ITS will be compared against those without ITS (i.e., they do not rely on communication or tracking). The model is developed using a general-purpose simulation language, AweSim (Pritsker, 1997). The simulation model is generic and independent of any dedicated transit network. The model has high flexibility and can be used to simulate different kinds of transit networks with varying numbers of bus lines and different travel patterns. The user has the flexibility to input the appropriate control strategy at each bus stop. With this approach an identical replica of an actual system can be simulated. This report documents the approach used in the development of the simulation model, the input and output files of the model, and the execution of the simulation model.
Recently, bus transit service providers have begun to adopt Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Mobile Data Terminals. These systems taken together have the potential to reduce the cost of providing transportation services through the execution of real-time control strategies, performance monitoring systems and data collection to support service realignment. We evaluate bus control strategies using ITS against those without ITS. Two levels of ITS are considered: (1) system with centralized tracking and (2) system with information on connecting passengers, as well as centralized tracking. For those strategies using ITS, we develop methods to forecast bus arrival times to a stop and the number passengers on board the bus. Results of a simulation analysis show that the ITS based strategies have the potential to improve connectivity between origins and destinations while reducing passenger waiting times.
California's wine grape growers will face increasing challenges under a changing climate as most production occurs near the boundaries of current varieties' climatic thresholds. As part of this study, we developed a method for transforming downscaled climate information from the publicly available Cal-Adapt database into useful and useable climate projections for vineyard managers and advisors in the Paso Robles American Viticultural Area. We shared vineyard-specific projections during interviews of 20 managers and advisors. Overall, interviewees expressed trust in the projections and found them helpful in reducing their psychological distance from climate change. The projections prompted consideration of strategies for managing future climate risk and planning adaptation, with the majority of adaptations associated with long-term decisions such as row orientation, variety selection, dry farming, crop diversification and relocation. Agri-climatic decision support tools such as the one prototyped here may prove especially helpful for incorporating climate adaptation into the long-term business planning and vineyard redevelopment decisions facing managers and advisors in the near future. This approach could be extended to other California wine grape regions or to other perennial crops with expected vulnerabilities to climate change.
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