pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

PacTrans engages PIs in research with several different categories of projects. Single-institution (or small) projects that typically have more modest budgets, and multi-institution projects that require PI collaboration within our consortium and typically have more substantial budgets, and finally, we have two special, ongoing projects each year. One revolves specifically around education and other around outreach. The specific theme is identified by our board of directors and then the director-representative from each of or five consortium partner institutions identifies a PI from their university to be part of the five-person team that works on this project.

Beginning with our MAP-21 grant in 2014, the outreach project has been focused on reduction of vehicular accidents, more specifically lane departure crashes. In the most recently completed phase of this project, David Hurwitz (OSU, Lead PI), Linda Boyle (UW), Leila Hajibabai (WSU), Billy Connor (UAF), and Ahmed Abdel-Rahim (UI), created a public service announcement competition for students at both the high school and college levels. Essentially students had to produce a 20 to 30 second youtube video, and series of 5 tweets/Instagram posts, and a poster that all got at the issue of lane departure crashes. The intent here was to utilize students’ understandings of their peers to generate media that was relevant and meaningful to them.

PacTrans received dozens of submissions from across all four states within our Region through the portal set up on our website. These are just a few of the highly creative examples we received.

In this upcoming year, the last year of this particular outreach project. The team will explore outreach to K-9 students. This will likely be in the form of class projects and presentations at elementary and middle schools, as well as engaging the students at outreach events like OSU’s Undergraduate Engineering Expo and UW’s Engineering Discovery Days. More to come on those soon.