Our research concentrates on four areas that emphasize the cross-cutting issues and concerns identified in Highway Research and Technology: The Need for Greater Investment, build on the expertise of faculty, reflect the interests of our local partners, and are relevant to other corridors and the national significance of the BOSWASH corridor:

• Planning - Understanding and anticipating the relationships among transportation, land use, and economic development in corridors is essential to resiliency. We need to develop planning approaches that are based on understanding the dynamics of transportation systems and corridors in terms of a model of resiliency. In short, the concept of resiliency makes special demands on the conventional planning processes, and we must recognize and accommodate this. Also, the long history of transportation improvements/systems in the BOSTFOLK corridor offers an opportunity to study the historic resiliency of systems with long functional/engineering lives as a basis for understanding and modeling contemporary and future behavior/resiliency.

• Ecology and the Environment - Corridors not only transport people and goods but also facilitate the spread of invasive species, concentrate air quality issues, and impose external pressures on the environment. Also, corridors not only break up ecological zones and habitats but create their own linear ecological environments, which are poorly understood. Linking planning, design, operating, and maintenance strategies to enhance the ecological and environmental quality of transportation corridors is a challenging problem.

• Infrastructure Renewal - Planning for and executing infrastructure renewal projects and strategies are key to the proper functioning of transportation corridors. Asset management strategies, innovative repair and replacement techniques, and new materials and contracting practices require additional research to be effective for corridor applications.

• Operations and Management - Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have had a significant impact on the operation and management of our transportation systems, particularly corridors. However, in the areas of congestion mitigation and management and emergency preparedness and response, corridors play a unique role as critical links and bottlenecks to mobility and accessibility. Research on how to better leverage our knowledge of the corridor is key to preparedness and response to unanticipated events.