Hess Transportation Study Wins "Best Paper Competition"

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Daniel Hess, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, has won the 2006 Best Paper Competition sponsored by the University Transportation Research Center (UTRC) at City University of New York.

The paper, which reports on the outcome of a study that Hess, as principal investigator, conducted with Brian D. Taylor and Allison C. Yoh, both of UCLA, is titled "Light Rail Lite or Cost-Effective Improvements to Bus Service? Evaluating Costs to Implementing Bus Rapid Transit."

It originally was published in the Transportation Research Record, the journal of the Transportation Research Board, in 2004.

Hess will receive the award at the Annual Leadership in Transportation Awards reception in New York City on Feb. 15. The ceremony will be hosted by the New York University Wagner Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management and The Council on Transportation.

The winning paper looks at two distinct emerging views of the rapidly growing U.S. trend toward developing bus rapid transit systems (BRT). One is BRT as a new form of high-speed, rubber-tired, rail-like rapid transit. The second is BRT as a cost-effective way to upgrade both the quality and image of traditional fixed-route bus service.

The study analyzed the BRT costs of 14 planned and recently opened BRT systems to determine how the wide range of BRT service and technology configurations affect costs.

They found that although some of the most successful and popular new BRT systems are high-quality services operating in mixed traffic that were implemented at relatively low cost, most BRT projects on the drawing boards are more elaborate, more expensive systems than many currently in service.

Research by Hess interprets how the built environment of cities (and the public policies that support them) influences travel behavior. He is particularly interested in transit system performance and alternative transit-funding arrangements, and he has conducted evaluations of employer and university transit pass programs, consulted with federal, state and local planning agencies and conducted an investigation of transit services and job access from Buffalo neighborhoods with high poverty rates.

He is a resident of Buffalo.