RSS 1.0Arctic Infrastructure Development Center (AIDC) Publications
AIDC was formerly known as Alaska University Transportation Center (AUTC)
Sub-communities within this community
Collections in this community
-
AIDC Other
Maps, datasets, and presentations
Recent Submissions
-
Access, Equity, and Safety in Rural Road Development: Historical Evidence from the Dalton Highway, 1974-2024This study investigates the historical example of the construction of the Dalton Highway—the most significant new road built in Alaska since 1971—to analyze how historical changes in access (both new infrastructures and access policies) and equity (who decides, who benefits, who is seen as a stakeholder) have impacted safety, broadly defined, in rural, isolated, tribal, and indigenous (RITI) communities throughout Northern Alaska.
-
Learning from the Permafrost & Infrastructure Symposium: merging science, engineering, and community-based knowledgeThe 2023 Permafrost & Infrastructure Symposium brought over 30 Arctic scientists, engineers, planners, and policymakers to Northern Alaska to see the impacts of permafrost thaw on roads and community infrastructure firsthand and to learn from those who live and work in the Arctic. For the symposium’s first half (July 28–August 1), participants gathered at the Barrow Arctic Research Center in Utqiaġvik for presentations, field trips and discussions focused on critical climate-related issues prioritized by local governments on the North Slope. They were joined in Utqiaġvik by key personnel from the North Slope Borough (NSB), regional housing authority, local utility cooperative, and the Alaska Native villages of Point Lay and Wainwright. Twenty participants flew to Deadhorse, Alaska, for the start of the second half of the symposium (August 1–5), which focused on transportation infrastructure and permafrost landscapes in Prudhoe Bay and south along the 416-mile Dalton Highway towards Fairbanks. A closing half-day session at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Usibelli Engineering Learning and Innovation Building explored climate adaptation planning strategies with talks by the Commissioner of Alaska DOT&PF and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of the Secretary. The symposium produced recommendations for the future.
-
Safe Reinforcement Learning for Intersection Management in RITI Communities Under Rare Extreme EventsThe rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the transportation sector, with applications spanning autonomous vehicles, driver injury prevention, and traffic management. Efficient traffic management, particularly through adaptive intersection control, holds significant potential for reducing congestion. This study explores the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to adaptive traffic signal control in rural, isolated, tribal, and indigenous (RITI) communities, which face unique challenges such as rare extreme weather events. Standard RL approaches struggle in these contexts due to limited exposure to these rare events. In our study, we first evaluate several mainstream RL algorithms and identified two most promising approaches. Then, we propose to use offline RL algorithms, which can train on existing datasets before interacting with the real environments. This provides a robust solution because (1) it is costly to deploy the algorithm and let the traffic network operate under suboptimal policies before the algorithm learns the optimal policy, and (2) it mimics the scenario where some events are not seen in the training dataset. We compare the performance of offline RL algorithms using different offline datasets, generated by policies of different levels of expertise, in realistic test cases. Results indicate that offline RL approaches perform better when trained on datasets from expert policies, stressing the importance of the quality of the offline datasets. These findings highlight the potential of RL-based adaptive traffic control for improving transportation efficiency, especially when tailored to the specific conditions of RITI communities.
-
EFFECTS OF TOURISM ON RURAL ROADS & RURAL DELIVERY WITH CAVWhile some congestion is expected at rural attractions such as national parks, theme parks, special sporting events, scenic points and the like, there are locations along the rural highway network that nearby attractions cause substantial congestion and/or unusually elevated traffic safety risk. This paper presents the case of two very popular tourist attractions on the North Shore of the Island of Oahu in the State of Hawaii: Laniakea Beach and Shark’s Cove. These locations are within five miles of each other and are served solely by the 2-lane rural Kamehameha Highway. These two locations have been congestion black spots for over a decade, and local opposition to more development and tourism has been substantial. A team of students in civil engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has been meeting with the local communities and has collected sample data to substantiate the extent of the problem. Several discussions were completed, where mitigation proposals were presented and discussed. This paper summarizes both the history of this problem, and the various data collected such as vehicular and pedestrian volumes, travel times and queue lengths. It also presents a list of proposed mitigations. There is a multitude of problems with most of the proposals including cost, appeal (they are not context sensitive), difficulty with agency jurisdictional bounds, community acceptance and risk from waves and long-term sea level rise.
-
Center for Safety Equity in Transportation (CSET) Baseline Data and OutreachThe research presented herein summarizes the research and education efforts conducted at the University of Alaska Fairbanks as part of the Outreach, Synthesis, and Baseline Data efforts promoted by the Center for Safety Equity in its first year of operation. These key areas were to effectively engage relevant parties needed for larger research efforts, better evaluate what work has been done and how effective existing programs are and establish a baseline using existing and relevant data to inform and evaluate CSET safety efforts and identify commonalities and differences in RITI safety needs across the consortium states. Dozens of outreach events were hosted by CSET and several other events in which CSET participated to develop and foster key connections and collaborations with community members and agencies. CSET help sponsor and coordinate a regional conference focusing on transportation safety, bringing together diverse perspectives on the safety needs of rural, isolated, tribal, and indigenous (RITI) communities. CSET regularly participated in the annual Alaska Federation of Natives convention, using it as an opportunity for outreach and knowledge gathering. Three-dimensional models were designed and printed for the purpose of demonstrating the challenges of building roads in Alaska. Available data sources were compared to determine and highlight deficiencies in current analytical frameworks and support the need to incorporate other data sources in rural and tribal communities for the purposes of transportation planning and safety evaluation.
-
Promoting Positive Traffic Safety Culture in RITI Communities through Active Engagement: Implementation Guide and Outreach ActivitiesRural, Indigenous, Tribal, and Isolated (RITI) communities’ crash data analysis clearly highlights three major areas of concern: prevalence of excessive speed, impaired and distracted driving, and underage driving. Safety-focused educational programs and awareness campaigns have all contributed to a reduction in crashes in urban areas. However, in RITI communities, much more work is still needed. It is important that communities are provided with the proper resources and methods to deliver the appropriate training and educational tools that promote and cause a significant positive change in the traffic safety culture. Through reviewed literature and interviews with tribal community stakeholders, this research team came to understand that tribal youth are most impacted and engaged when educational material is made culturally relevant. We then developed an implementation guide to be used by tribes to create, develop, and enact a sustained educational program with the mission to positively impact traffic safety culture among youth in tribal and rural communities.
