1991 Transportation Engineering Research Reports

The engineering research reports in this document resulted from the second year of the Undergraduate Transportation Engineering Fellows Program during the summer of 1991. The ten-week program, sponsored by the Advanced Institute program of the Southwest Region University Transportation Center (SWUTC), the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), and the Civil Engineering Department at Texas A&M University, provides undergraduate students in Civil Engineering with the opportunity to learn more about transportation engineering through participation in a transportation research program. The program design allows the students to interact directly with a faculty member or TTI researcher in developing a research proposal, conducting appropriate research, and documenting the research results. This compendium contains reports on a wide variety of transportation research. The first report discusses the development of a database and priority index for railroad-highway grade crossings. Readers interested in freeway operations will find reports of an evaluation of an inside merge at a major freeway-freeway connection and of a high volume merge operation. Another report contains a study of frontage road queuing and vehicle spacing at diamond interchanges. A study of the relationships between speed and geometric inconsistencies along rural highways is included, as well as an investigation of various operating characteristics of inductance loop detectors. One report contains information on forecasting turning flows, and another dicusses lane closure guidelines for arterial street work zones. An examination of the indicators of congestion level also is included.