We exploit historical data on planned highways, railroads, and exploration routes as sources of exogenous variation in order to estimate the effect of interstate highways on regional innovation: a 10% increase in a region’s stock of highways causes a 1.7% increase in regional patenting over a five-year period. In terms of the mechanism, we report evidence that roads facilitate local knowledge f...

This paper presents a version of the monocentric city model that incorporates heterogeneous commuting speeds by introducing radial commuting highways. This model implies that metropolitan area population spreads out along new highways, which are positively valued by residents. Simulations of conservative specifications of the model imply that each additional highway ray causes about a 10 percen...

We consider the problem of computing all farthest neighbors (and the diameter) of a given set of n points in the presence of highways and obstacles in the plane. When traveling on the plane, travelers may use highways for faster movement and must avoid all obstacles. We present an efficient solution to this problem based on knowledge from earlier research on shortest path computation. Our algor...

Empirical data and statistical models are employed to predict where new highway routes are most likely to be located. The land use, population distribution, and highway network for the Twin Cities’ Metro Area from 1958 to 1990 are used. Binary logit models estimate the likelihood a particular cell will see the construction of divided highways and secondary highways. The results show that the ar...

This study evaluates the impact of the 65-mph speed limit on traffic safety. Using data for the years 1981 to 1995 for all 50 states, a pooled time series analysis is conducted. Separate models are estimated for state fatality rates on four categories of roads: rural interstate highways, rural noninterstate roads, all roads except for rural interstate highways, and all roads. It is reported tha...

IN T R O D U C T IO N More than 76,000 miles of roads are under county control in Indiana—a responsibility for county road authorities which almost defies measurement. The magnitude of the task is indicated, however, by two factors: annual expenditures, which in 1958 totaled over $40 million, and employment, which totaled several thousand persons. This responsibility places great problems on th...

Because of the dispersion of activities in big cities, employing highways as the most important connecting way is indispensable. In today world, highways are connection arteries of cities transporting people to their social activities. Because of continual use of highway, their walls prepare a context for conveying many Social, Cultural, Economic, etc concepts. That is why most economic promoti...

In spite of significant advances in highways safety, a lot of crashes in high severities still occur in highways. Investigation of influential factors on crashes enables engineers to carry out calculations in order to reduce crash severity. Therefore, this paper deals with the models to illustrate the simultaneous influence of human factors, road, vehicle, weather conditions and traffic feature...

Evaluating the permeability of potential barriers to movement, dispersal and gene exchanges can help describe spreading patterns of wildlife diseases. Here, we used landscape genetics methods to assess the genetic structure of the striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis), which is a frequent vector of rabies, a lethal zoonosis of great concern for public health. Our main objective was to identify land...

This is to certify that I have examined this copy of a master's thesis by WEI CHEN and have found that it is complete and satisfactory in all respects, and that any and all revisions required by the final examining committee have been made. Principal Investigator of this project, for his inspiration and direction on this research. Throughout my study in University of Minnesota, he provided pati...