SGER: Responding to the Unexpected: Understanding Travelers' Behavioral Choices in the Wake of the Mississippi River Bridge Collapse

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This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) project aims to collect perishable traffic data after the bridge collapse to understand travelers' behavioral choices and how traffic evolve from a dis-equilibrium state to a potential equilibria. The recent collapse of the Interstate 35W Highway Bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis has resulted in immediate loss of life and serious consequences for mobility and accessibility in the Twin Cities metropolitan region. Under such a severe network disruption, the traffic equilibria has been disturbed and travelers need to learn new traffic patterns and eventually (it may take weeks) network traffic may evolve into a new equilibria (if any). Understanding the transition and learning processes of travelers' behavioral responses are essential to effective traffic management after network disruption and long-term transportation planning. Both aggregated highway traffic data and disaggregated traveler behavioral choice data will be collected. Because the traffic pattern is evolving in a day-to-day context and it becomes more and more difficult for travelers to recall their choices as time passes, the quality of data collection fades over time. Therefore the data collection effort proposed in this project needs to be initiated immediately.This project addresses a major and immediate problem that road users throughout the United States currently face. Besides the tragedy of I-35W Bridge collapse, recent headline news on the collapse of the ramp leading to the I-80 Bay Bridge in California also illustrates the vulnerability of the network. Considering the significant public distress caused by such events, the objectives of this research are crucial to the well-being of our society. The PIs will make their best effort to convey the findings from this research widely to the transportation engineering and planning community, and to integrate the findings to educate the next generation of engineers.