Living Below the Line: Economic Insecurity and America's Families

Since the onset of the Great Recession, the nation has been focused on a steady stream of mostly discouraging unemployment, poverty and housing foreclosure numbers. While this data is important, it tells us only about those suffering the most severe of financial crises. It does not help identify the millions within the United States who live above the poverty line and yet struggle to pay ever-increasing housing, food, health care and other expenses. Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) has compared working-age adults' earnings and household incomes to The Basic Economic Security Tables (BEST) for the United States, a measure of the basic needs and assets workers and their households require for economic security. This report compares pre-tax incomes from 2007 through 2011 to BEST basic needs budgets for more than 400 family types,and finds that approximately 45% of Americans live on incomes that fail to provide basic economic security.This report identifies who, specifically, within the United States is living below the BEST Indexes. It tells an important story about the contemporary value of work and the relationship between economic security and gender, race/ethnicity, family structure and education

Bus Transit Service Planning and Operations in a Competitive Environment

Transit services are currently facing several challenges in the United States and around the world. For many reasons, among which the fluctuations in gas prices and the state of the economy are the major ones, transit demand has noticed a considerable increase. The challenge that transit agencies are facing is to make these increases permanent by maintaining transit’s competitive edge over the private vehicle with more dense and reliable service. Current methodologies for scheduling new as well as improving existing transit routes should be able to respond to the dynamic nature of urban traffic as it is evolving through ITS and more comprehensive traffic management strategies. In this research paper, we correlate travel time obtained from buses to travel time obtained from floating vehicles in the Twin Cities metropolitan region. This research helps to introduce more reliable estimates of travel time for planning new and competitive transit services. Specifically, this work studied two bus routes over a variety of different roadway types and traffic conditions and produced statistical models that can estimate travel time based on measurements collected from buses and regular vehicle probes. The generated models revealed the characteristics causing bus service to be generally slower. Altering bus route characteristics can reduce overall travel time and minimize the travel time disparity between buses and private vehicles. In particular, the models presented in this paper lend support to bus-only shoulder policies, stop consolidation, serving major streets with fewer stop signs, and implementation of smart transit signal priority

Bus Transit Service Planning and Operations in a Competitive Environment

Transit services are currently facing several challenges in the United States and around the world. For many reasons, among which the fluctuations in gas prices and the state of the economy are the major ones, transit demand has noticed a considerable increase. The challenge that transit agencies are facing is to make these increases permanent by maintaining transit’s competitive edge over the private vehicle with more dense and reliable service. Current methodologies for scheduling new as well as improving existing transit routes should be able to respond to the dynamic nature of urban traffic as it is evolving through ITS and more comprehensive traffic management strategies. In this research paper, we correlate travel time obtained from buses to travel time obtained from floating vehicles in the Twin Cities metropolitan region. This research helps to introduce more reliable estimates of travel time for planning new and competitive transit services. Specifically, this work studied two bus routes over a variety of different roadway types and traffic conditions and produced statistical models that can estimate travel time based on measurements collected from buses and regular vehicle probes. The generated models revealed the characteristics causing bus service to be generally slower. Altering bus route characteristics can reduce overall travel time and minimize the travel time disparity between buses and private vehicles. In particular, the models presented in this paper lend support to bus-only shoulder policies, stop consolidation, serving major streets with fewer stop signs, and implementation of smart transit signal priority

Access to Destinations: Parcel Level Land Use Data Acquisition and Analysis for Measuring Non-Auto Accessibility

This research aids in tackling one important part of accessibility metrics—measuring land use. It introduces complementary strategies to effectively measure a variety of different destination types at a highly detailed scale of resolution using secondary data. The research describes ways to overcome common data hurdles and demonstrates how existing data in one metropolitan area in the U.S. –the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul –can be exploited to aid in measuring accessibility at an extremely fine unit of analysis (i.e., the parcel). Establishment-level data containing attribute information on location, sales, employees, and industry classification was purchased from Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. The research process involved cleaning and tailoring the parcel dataset for the 7-county metro area and integrating various GIS datasets with other secondary data sources. These data were merged with parcel-level land use data from the Metropolitan Council. The establishment-level data were then recoded into destination categories using the 2 to 6-digit classifications of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The development of important components of this research is illustrated with a sample application. The report concludes by describing how such data could be used in calculating more robust measures of accessibility.Minnesota Department of Transportatio

Analyzing Transit Service Reliability Using Detailed Data From Automatic Vehicular Locator Systems

The widespread adoption of automated vehicle location systems (AVL) and automatic passenger counters (APC) in the transit industry has opened new venues in operations and system monitoring. In 2005, Metro Transit, Minnesota, implemented AVL system and partially implemented APC technologies. To date there has been little effort to employ the collected data in evaluating transit performance. This research uses such data to assess performance issues along a cross-town route in the Metro Transit system. We generate a series of visual and analytical analyses to predict run time, schedule adherence and reliability of the transit route at two scales: the time point segment and the route level to demonstrate ways of identifying causes of decline in reliability levels. The analytical models show that while headways are maintained, schedule revisions are needed to improve run time and schedule adherence. Finally, the analysis suggests that many scheduled stops along this route are underutilized and recommends stop consolidation as a tool to decrease variability of service through concentrating passenger demand along a fewer number of stops

Use of sequence variation in three highly variable regions of the mitochondrial DNA for the discrimination of allogeneic platelets

BACKGROUND: Human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) polymorphisms can be used to detect allogeneic transfused platelets. To increase the number of informative polymorphisms we investigated three hypervariable regions (HVR1, HVR2, and HVR3) within the displacement loop (D-loop) region of the mtDNA. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: mtDNA was obtained from 119 unrelated blood donors. Forward and reverse primers were designed and conditions optimized to amplify and sequence the template mtDNA by dye terminator cycle sequencing. RESULTS: We established a sequencing protocol for all three HVRs of the mtDNA. Polymorphic sites were found in all three regions: 66 in HVR1, 44 in HVR2, and 18 in HVR3. Combining the sequence information of HVR1, -2, and -3 resulted in 105 different genotypes of which 95 were unique. We were able to discriminate between two randomly chosen individuals with a random match probability of 1.2 percent. CONCLUSION: The D-loop region of mtDNA contains a wealth of informative molecular markers for chimerism and survival studies after transfusions of cellular blood components