pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

On behalf of the PacTrans Board of Directors, our External Advisory Board, and members of the Conference Planning Committee, PacTrans would like to thank everyone who participated in this year’s Regional Transportation Conference.

This year’s conference, hosted on the University of Washington campus, saw record turn out with over 250 participants. There was a great mix of academic researchers, government agencies, private industry professionals, and students. The morning began with two keynotes, United States Congressman, Rick Larsen, gave a “people” keynote address, and Northwest Seaport Alliance Deputy CEO, Kurt Beckett, gave a “goods” keynote address.

The first session was dedicated to three presentations by PacTrans PIs on current or recently completely research. We heard from Michael Olsen of Oregon State University on new methods for proactively accessing landslide/rockfall risk, Jeff Ban from the University of Washington on transportation big data and analytics, and Axel Krings of the University of Idaho on DSRC Safety Implications with regard potential security risks. The second session was devoted to the subject of technology transfer. Here we heard from Aaron Antrim of Trillium Solutions, Elizabeth Sall of UrbanLabs, and Ted Trepanier from INRIX. The third session tackled workforce development where we heard from Paul Mather of ODOT, Patrick Lynch of Transpo Group, and Todd Kelsay of Lyft. The final panel discussion was a research listening session where academic researchers had an opportunity to hear from private industry and public agencies about where they see research needs. We heard from Chris Johnson of Oregon Metro, Jesse Gastelle of the US Department of Agriculture, and Angela Konert of BMW.

Other activities included a poster session with over thirty posters featuring PacTrans funded research, as well as an award presentation ceremony. This year the PacTrans Board decided to begin offering three awards: an annual Outstanding Researcher of the Year Award, an annual Outstanding Partner of the Year Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award. This year the Research of the Year was Michael Olsen of Oregon State University, the Partner of the Year was the Washington State Department of Transportation, and the Lifetime Achievement Award want to Scott Rutherford of the University of Washington.

Each year PacTrans produces a newsletter recapping all of these events including links to the recorded videos of each discussion. This newsletter will likely come out in early March and can be found here when it is published!