Phase 2 Outreach Plan- Buffalo, NY ITS4US Deployment Project

693JJ321C000005The Buffalo NY ITS4US Deployment Project seeks to improve mobility to, from, and within the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus by deploying new and advanced technologies with a focus on addressing existing mobility and accessibility challenges. Examples of the technologies to be deployed are electric and self-driving shuttles, a trip planning app that is customized for accessible travel, intersections that use tactile and mobile technologies to enable travelers with disabilities to navigate intersections, and Smart Infrastructure to support outdoor and indoor wayfinding. The deployment geography includes the 120-acre Medical Campus and surrounding neighborhoods with a focus on three nearby neighborhoods (Fruit Belt, Masten Park, and Allentown) with underserved populations (low income, vision loss, deaf or hard of hearing, physical disabilities (including wheeled mobility device users) and older adults). This document is the Outreach Plan for Phase 2 of the project, which identifies the outreach efforts this project will perform to promote and ensure stakeholder engagement

Economic Implications of the Canada–U.S. Border Bridges: Applying a Binational Local Economic Model for International Freight Movements

This study provides an approach to measuring the local economic costs stemming from delays on bridges connecting the U.S. and Canada. We focused on two of the busiest bridges in the U.S. and Canada that connect the Buffalo–Niagara metropolitan region and Ontario province, using an approach that combines spatial networks and local economic impact models to estimate the economic costs of border delays on the local economies of the border regions. We estimated that the local economic impacts of delays on the Canada–U.S. border bridges in the range of $36,000 to$110,000 per day in total, indicating that a 1 percent increase of delay cost can produce 1.33 percent economic costs in total at the bridge connecting Buffalo and Ontario. Furthermore, the binational economic model provides information on which industries are most impacted from shipping delays on the bridges via supply chain, based on various scenarios. Our modeling approach and scenario development process have important implications for border-traffic planning analysis and border-city economies because they allow numerous simulation tests with respect to changes of international freight transportation costs and patterns for key economic sectors