Estimating the Life-Cycle Cost of Intersection Designs (2016)

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

NCHRP Project 03-110: Estimating the Life-Cycle Cost of Intersection Designs Final Report Page 92 Chapter 5 – Conclusions and Future Research CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH This section of the report summarizes the conclusions from the findings of NCHRP Project 03-110, Estimating the Life-Cycle Cost of Intersection Designs. In addition, suggested future research topics have been summarized. 5.1. CONCLUSIONS The product of this project is the Life-Cycle Cost Estimation Tool (LCCET), a spreadsheet-based tool to enable an analyst to estimate the life-cycle costs of a series of alternatives. The LCCET has been intentionally designed to be flexible over a wide range of system configurations, with the flexibility to accommodate everything from single intersections through corridors and subareas. The flexibility provided by this tool comes with the requirement that the analyst use external sources for estimating some of the key performance measures that are used as inputs to the LCCET, including operational performance, safety performance, and so on. It is believed that the LCCET will be a useful addition to the analyst’s toolbox for providing quantifiable information on life-cycle costs of alternatives to help decision makers make informed decisions. 5.2. FUTURE RESEARCH SUGGESTIONS Throughout the course of this research effort, the research team identified areas of further research that would provide additional benefit to this topic area, but could not be included within the scope of NCHRP Project 03-110. These topics include the following: • Further methodological integration of the variety of HCM operational analyses and alternative tool assessments (e.g., simulation) for intersections, urban streets, and interchanges as new methods are developed for a variety of configurations. Due to the complexity of these tools, it is unlikely these would be directly integrated into the LCCET. However, as HCM methods are further expanded and refined, the guidance for using the LCCET could be expanded to explicitly cover a broader range of cases, particularly for complex intersections, corridors, and systems. • Direct integration of HSM models into the LCCET to simplify the prediction process. These would need to match the range of alternatives described previously for operational analyses. • Direct integration of emissions models into the LCCET. • Assessment of the sensitivity of various inputs into the life-cycle costs. While the LCCET enables this testing, this project could not prepare a comprehensive set of sensitivity tests to illustrate the range of inputs and their relative contributions to life-cycle costs. • A plan for ongoing maintenance and updates for the LCCET, should it remain a public entity and not be integrated into commercial software.