Modeling the Effects of Socioeconomic Factors in Highway Construction and Expansion
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 135, Issue 12
Abstract
The increasing commuting population often fuels the need for new highways. As the demand for new highways increases, many low-income neighborhoods are often considered for placement of new highways. While this issue has long been recognized as part of environmental justice and context-sensitive solution initiatives, no quantitative comparisons of highway construction impacts on low-income families have been reported in the literature. The objective of this research is to develop a general methodology to model the effects of socioeconomic factors in highway construction and expansion, to examine impacts on low-income families. The general methodology developed can be applied to various income classes to determine the extent of impact with new highway construction. Penalty costs are chosen and used to penalize highway alignments crossing low-income areas. Multiple values for penalty costs are used to test the sensitivity of generated alignments. Tests are performed to examine the robustness of the developed methodology. The results lead to the need for developing appropriate penalty costs that are suitable for avoiding low-income areas. This research is a first step in quantifying the impacts of highway construction and expansion on low-income families.
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Acknowledgments
The writers thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This work was completed at the Center for Advanced Transportation and Infrastructure Engineering Research (www.eng.morgan.edu/~catier) at the Morgan State University and is part of the first writer’s doctoral dissertation work.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 135 • Issue 12 • December 2009
Pages: 990 - 998
Copyright
© 2009 ASCE.
History
Received: Jun 15, 2007
Accepted: May 15, 2009
Published online: Nov 13, 2009
Published in print: Dec 2009
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