All posts by trac

This project will provide training services to WSDOT to address the agency’s immediate and long-term workforce development needs. The transportation industry is facing workforce challenges. Transportation professionals need access to continuing education to keep up with quickly changing knowledge and technologies that enhance the efficiency and reliability of existing transportation infrastructure. In addition, the industry is facing the issue that more than 50 percent of the nation’s state transportation agency workforce will be eligible to retire in the next decade. This means that transportation agencies need to recruit more junior and less experienced employees to address a looming labor shortage. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) recognizes these issues and the importance of workforce development to maintain and improve its organizational strength. The PacTrans Workforce Development Institute is a program that provides demand-responsive and flexible training services to transportation agencies in the Pacific Northwest. Working with WSDOT, it will offer customized training to the agency’s working professionals on three topics of immediate importance: the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), human factors, and data analysis and tools. An additional, long-term objective is to collaborate with WSDOT to develop and deliver additional relevant training courses, webinars, and workshops to help WSDOT address its long-term workforce development needs.

Principle Investigator: Yinhai Wang, Civil and Environmental Engineering, UW
Sponsor: WSDOT
WSDOT Technical Monitor: Monica Harwood
WSDOT Project Manager: Doug Brodin
Scheduled completion: July 2021

Iterative Rollout, Assessment, and Enhancement of a Cloud-Based Virtual Coordination Center for Regional Mobility Management, Year 1. Traffic incident management (TIM) is the process of coordinating the resources of various partner agencies and private sector companies to detect, respond to, and clear traffic incidents as quickly as possible to reduce the impacts of incidents on congestion while protecting the safety of on-scene responders and the traveling public. This project is looking at how TIM in the Puget Sound region can be improved by incorporating congestion management (CM). Researchers at the UW Center for Collaborative Systems for Security, Safety, and Regional Resilience are building on Phase II of their research to implement, use, and assess a shared Virtual Coordination Center (VCC). The VCC will provide new shared data and capabilities and support enhanced collaboration, not only during major incidents, but also during day-to-day management of the regional transportation system. In Phase II, traffic incident managers, congestion managers, and population movement managers identified and visualized the desired capabilities of a common operational VCC environment. These capabilities focus on enabling enhanced, timely data sharing to support a common situational awareness, as well as coordinated regional response among the diverse multi-agency community. In Phase III Year One, an operational, integrated computer-aided dispatch (CAD) will be developed within the VCC environment.

Principal Investigator: Mark Haselkorn, Human Centered Design and Engineering, UW
Sponsor: WSDOT
WSDOT Technical Monitor: Ron Vessey
WSDOT Project Manager: Doug Brodin
Scheduled completion: June 2021

The federal funding and authorization bill called Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), passed by Congress in June 2012, governs U.S. federal surface transportation spending. MAP-21 established a performance- and outcome-based program that requires states to invest in projects that collectively will achieve national transportation goals. With the May 2017 federal rule regarding the third round of performance reporting requirements (“PM3”), centered on congestion and freight systems, every state department of transportation and metropolitan planning organization has several new responsibilities. The objective of this project, led by Cambridge Systematics, is to develop a framework, based on FHWA’s adopted PM3 performance measures and other supporting metrics, that states can use to determine whether their operational strategies and projects are providing the desired and expected operational and cost benefits. The researchers will also document case studies that demonstrate the influence of operational strategies on the reported values of PM3 statistics and related metrics and will document a marketing and outreach plan that shares the outcomes of this project.

Principal Investigator: Mark E. Hallenbeck, Washington State Transportation Center, UW

Sponsors:
Cambridge Systematics
Federal Highway Administration

Cambridge Systematics Principal Investigator: Richard Margiotta
FHWA Technical Monitor: Rich Taylor
Scheduled completion: August 2022

The goal of this project is to provide Washington State Safe Routes to School programs with data that will support future efforts to promote active school travel and to ensure the safety of students traveling to school. Although Safe Routes to School (SRTS) programs have been shown to increase the number of children who walk or bike to school, they are relatively small programs within departments of transportation, and they compete with funding for other surface transportation operations. Data-driven evidence that clearly shows the effectiveness and efficiency of their funding would be of benefit. This project will test three hypotheses using the unique longitudinal data set of Student Travel for Washington State, in combination with data on school characteristics, school neighborhood street infrastructure and land use, SRTS projects, and statewide vehicular collisions. The tested hypotheses will be that neighborhood walkability around schools is associated with higher rates of students walking to school; rates of walking and biking to school increase following the completion of SRTS projects; and higher rates of students walking and biking to school are not related to higher rates of collision between youth and vehicles near schools. This use of unique data sets on school- and grade-based travel, along with related land-use and traffic safety data, will support a data-driven approach to improving student mobility and safety.

Principal Investigator: Anne Vernez Moudon, Urban Design and Planning, UW
Sponsor: PacTrans
Scheduled completion: August 2021

Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) has estimated that over 94,500 tons of food from Seattle businesses end up in the compost or garbage. If just 5 percent was edible and could be rescued and redistributed, it could result in nearly 8 million additional meals for food insecure individuals.  To support efforts to reduce food insecurity while simultaneously diverting less food to the waste stream, the UW Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center will build on the work of Seattle’s Food Rescue Innovation Lab to build a shared, data-driven understanding of the logistics of food rescue in the Puget Sound. This multi-year collaboration will build a community interested in rethinking food rescue logistics to improve access, food quality, and user experience while also reducing waste.  Ultimately, the city could use the findings of this research to inform external investments in the form of funding for community partners to test new kinds of collaboration, vehicles, storage, and more, and internal investments into things such as fleet electrification, charging station locations, and cold storage aggregation to serve food rescue without increasing climate change impacts.

Principal Investigator: Anne V. Goodchild, Civil and Environmental Engineering, UW
Sponsor: Seattle Public Utilities
Scheduled completion: December 2022