The need to maintain adequate traffic flow through short-term Interstate work zones is paramount on today's heavily traveled freeways. Numerous states have policies related to traffic flow thresholds, vehicle delay, and vehicle queue lengths that provide guidance on conditions when shortterm lane closures can be instituted. Generally, traffic flow threshold limits are a function of traffic-stream characteristics, highway geometry, work zone location, type of construction activities, and work zone configuration. A research study was initiated in South Carolina to examine quantitatively the development and implementation of a methodology for use in determining an updated lane-closure policy based on statespecific parameters. The study focused on determining the number of vehicles per lane per hour that can pass through short-term Interstate work zone lane closures with minimal or acceptable levels of delay. Research tasks included a survey of policies of other states, field-data collection, and methodology development. A methodology was developed with field data collected from 22 work zone sites along South Carolina's Interstate system. Data were obtained during a 12-month period from September 2001 to August 2002. Data collection procedures and data analysis methods employed in model development are summarized. Results of this study may be helpful to state highway agencies interested in developing similar research-based policy guidelines for short-term Interstate lane closures in their jurisdictions.

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In recent decades, Bengaluru as a metropolis has witnessed explosive growth – both in terms of population, which has doubled since 2001, and growth in vehicles, which have more than quadrupled in the same period (RTO 2016). This has significantly stressed the city’s road infrastructure, leading to congestion and increases in pollution. Economic losses due to congestion for two of the city’s Information Technology corridors alone are estimated at INR227.7 billion annually (Bharadwaj 2015), without taking into account the health costs of increased emissions due to a surge in the number of vehicles plying in the city. ‘Conventional’ solutions addressing congestion within the city — such as road widening, creating one ways and building grade separators such as flyovers and underpasses — have failed to address the issue, and at the current rate of increasing vehicular volumes, the city’s roads are forecast to be completely saturated by 2025.This paper’s premise is that public transport serves as the sole sustainable solution to Bengaluru’s chronic congestion; only a large mode-shift towards public transport by 2025 can help reduce congestion on the city’s roads. The paper advocates the Avoid-Shift-Improve strategy to achieve this, focusing on transport-specific improvements required to incentivise commuters to shift to public transport and identifies institutional and financial changes in the way of enhancing public transport in the city. The paper also forewarns against neglecting the city’s conventional bus system in favour of other, capital-intensive modes of mass-transit, forecasting that buses will continue to meet over 75% of the city’s public transport demand even after the completion of Phase I and II of the city’s metro and the introduction of a functional commuter rail system.

The Guidebook is a ready reckoner for transit agencies to help them adopt a calibrated approach to induct electric buses in their services. This is to ensure that the technology shift neither disrupts the quality of the bus service nor becomes burdensome for the transit agencies. Such a phased implementation hinges on several technical and financial considerations which are often inter-linked and limited by some constraints. To address this complex problem, the Guidebook suggests a six-step approach and two decision trees for transit agencies’ reference for route prioritization and implementation planning

The MS-Excel-based tool ‘Financial Analysis of Charging station (FACt)’ (the “Tool”) has been developed to help build an understanding of the business case for rolling out public charging infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs) in the Indian context. It is a flexible, transparent, and user-friendly solution to the problem of conducting a quick preliminary assessment of the financial justification for setting up a public charging station. The wide-ranging outputs from the Tool provide a well-rounded view of the financials of a public charging infrastructure project, including the project cost composition and the possible impact of various factors on the return. Currently, there is no publicly available open access application-based solution, made for the Indian market, that achieves the stated goals of FACt.