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RES2020-21: Calculating road user cost for specific sections of highway for use in alternative contracting projects

项目名称：	RES2020-21: Calculating road user cost for specific sections of highway for use in alternative contracting projects
摘要：	Road construction and maintenance activities – while essential to maintain road users’ experience and Level of Service (LOS) – is also a source of inconvenience to the users. Oftentimes, during construction of busy highways, there are significant delays because of a lane closure and slower moving vehicles. Other times, roads may be completely closed – forcing road users to take longer alternative routes. As such, highway agencies are constantly working to reduce road users’ inconvenience by studying and implementing various alternative project delivery methods. While traditional project delivery methods focus solely on the direct construction cost or apparent lowest bid as a single factor to identify the best contractor from a pool of qualified bidders, some of the alternative project delivery methods such as A+B include road user cost as an additional factor to select the best contractor. A road user cost consists of various components such as user delay costs, vehicle operating costs, crash costs, and emission costs. To aid state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) in utilizing alternative contracting methods such as A+B, FHWA conducted a comprehensive study and developed a methodology to calculate monetary values and evaluate qualitative components of a road users cost (Mallela and Sadasivam 2011). However, the current methodology is very extensive, complex, time consuming, and requires extensive data sets. This includes various traffic data such as average annual daily traffic and travel delay time; economic data such as household income; and roadway geometry parameters. Some of the required data may be readily available in-house, while collecting others may require a significant investment of time. In the current context where the sizes of DOTs are shrinking, and each employee is responsible for performing more work than in the past, this is a significant challenge. State DOTs may not be able to spend extra time computing road user costs even if it may result in reduction in the overall project cost. Thus, such practice of calculating road user cost is limited because of the need of investing a significant amount of time to calculate it despite its potential benefits. Some attempts have been made in the past by Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) to calculate a simplified version of road users cost for some Construction/Manager General Contractor (CMGC) projects such as the I-40 project in Davidson county. However, an oversimplification of the methodology might result in an inaccurate road user cost that might alter the decision on the choice of project delivery method and selection of the best contractor for the project. Thus, a more comprehensive and automated road user cost calculation methodology is needed to easily compute a road user cost and to use it for alternative project delivery methods such as A+B. This study will review past research on road users cost including FHWA’s “Work Zone Road User Costs” and develop and automate TDOT-specific road user cost calculation methodology to aid TDOT engineers in utilizing the readily available data to quickly calculate an accurate road user cost. The results of the study are expected to aid TDOT in deciding whether to use alternative project delivery methods such as A+B contracting method in any project, select the best bidder when such method is used, and compute liquidated damages and early project completion incentives.
状态：	Active
资金：	$98,995.75
资助组织：	Tennessee Department of Transportation
项目负责人：	Taylor, Morgan
执行机构：	East Tennessee State University
开始时间：	20191119
预计完成日期：	20210831
主题领域：	Administration and Management；Construction；Research