pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Over the past several years, PacTrans has funded a number of project investigated by Oregon State University Associate Professor of Civil & Construction Engineering, Haizhong Wang, on bicycle safety, including one on crowdsourcing bicycle travel data and one where he did a geospatial analysis of bicycle network “level of stress.” He also does a lot of research in the areas of emergency evacuation and disaster response in particular the evacuee decision-making behavior under emergent scenarios through agent-based modeling and simulation, and post-disaster transportation network resiliency and recovery problems. Recently Dr. Wang sought PacTrans Technology Transfer Success Story funds to promote the outcomes of these projects and a few others like them.

One portion of these funds were to conduct a questionnaire, sent to local engineers and communities. The questionnaire was designed to collect local engineers’ opinion about using a bicycle to evacuate for a disaster and also capture the potential behaviors and choices of communities as using non-motorized vehicles to evacuate. The flow chart above shows the process and idea. The questionnaire has been developed and is ready to be sent out. The target population are coastal city residents in North Pacific. A logistic choice model will be built based on the survey results and can help decision makers to determine and adapt new strategies for evacuation.

The other major contribution of these funds was to attend several very high caliber conferences where several of these projects were presented. In March of this year, Dr. Wang traveled to the XI ICTICT Workshop in Vancouver, British Columbia, two present two of these work, and in October of this year, he traveled to the 7th Annual International Cycling Safety Conference (ICSC) in Copenhagen, Denmark to present another such project.