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This year’s annual Awards Dinner Meeting will be on Wed, Feb 20th, 2013.
Please click on the link below for more details on this event:
http://wdcsite.org/events/annual-awards-dinner/
WDCSITE is delighted to invite you to the WDCSITE February Virtual Meeting on February 25th, 2021 from 4:00 to 5:30 PM EST. WDCSITE has received several Project of the Year presentation submissions for our last Read more…
WDCSITE is hosting a mock interview workshop to give you the tools needed to excel during the interview process on March 2nd, 2021 from 4:00 to 5:00 PM EST. The workshop will be a valuable Read more…
Over the last 2 months, WDCSITE has held 2 virtual STEM events for students in Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS). The recordings from these events have been posted on the BCPS YouTube Channel. We have Read more…
The District Department of Transportation (DDOT), supported by the Mead & Hunt consultant team, completed the traffic signal optimization of the Downtown section of DC, improving multimodal traffic flow at over 640 intersections, in November 2019. The project was a necessity in order to enhance the District’s multimodal transportation system; increase pedestrian safety throughout the region; to accommodate changes in travel patterns and volumes that have emerged from regional growth and development activities; and to coordinate newly installed traffic signals into the overall system. The goals of the project were to make DC traffic signals safer and friendlier for pedestrians and bicyclists; maintain bus running times and delays; and to accomplish these goals while minimizing negative impacts on traffic operations throughout the District.
In order to advance the District’s Vision Zero goal, the project team incorporated multimodal safety and mobility goals into the traditional signal optimization framework. As such, the team reimagined what the goals of a signal optimization project could be and used this opportunity to implement multimodal improvements on a large network-wide scale. The use of a signal program in such a manner ensures improvements are proactive, equitable, and efficient to implement as the enhancements are directly incorporated as part of the overall re-timing effort. Through automatic network-wide evaluations of treatments like LPIs, pretiming, and more, every signal that has been retimed has been evaluated for enhancement without waiting for citizen requests or a safety issue to materialize. This proactive approach has the potential to significantly improve safety by mitigating crashes before they occur. It is also more equitable than the traditional engineering approach used by many cities where “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Engineers can implement these treatments where truly needed before people even ask, and in all eight wards of the District.
While many of these changes would typically come at the expense of vehicular progression and delay, the project team leveraged their experience to minimize these impacts, essentially regaining all of the vehicular capacity lost to LPIs, pretiming, and other multimodal improvements. As a result, the team helped to create a more welcoming multimodal environment where community members and visitors can safely walk, ride, and thrive.
Rahul Jain is a Senior Transportation Engineer with the District Department of Transportation. His main tasks include overseeing major transportation projects and engineering contracts to ensure engineering standards and contractual requirements are met at all levels of planning and design, and performing detailed review of traffic operations, engineering design plans PS&E packages and MOT plans. Rahul serves as a technical liaison with internal staff and external stakeholders on planning, analysis and design aspects of various operational and safety improvement projects. He also regularly prepares and delivers technical briefing memos and presentations to Managers on selecting optimal engineering alternatives and designs.
Joshua Wolfgram is a traffic engineer with Mead & Hunt with three years of signal timing and multimodal design experience. He obtained his BSCE from Valparaiso University in 2016 and his MSCE from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2017. During his graduate program, he studied the Safety and Emissions Impacts of Alternative Intersection Designs through an Eisenhower Fellowship. Some of his significant projects include crafting DDOT’s LPI Implementation policy, developing and implementing optimized signal timings at over 1100 locations in the District, and preparing 230+ engineering designs for DDOT’s Vision Zero engineering initiatives. Joshua is passionate about incorporating multimodal safety and mobility enhancements into traffic signal projects.
This study introduces a novel integrated school bus problem that considers sequential operation of fleet for all three levels in a unit framework. An algorithm based on the simulated annealing (SA) method was developed to find the optimal routes based on minimization of school buses’ operating cost and total student traveling time. An example on a hypothetical network was developed and tested to demonstrate the developed algorithm. The algorithm successfully handled the integration of school buses’ optimal route generation while it met all constraints. The results showed that the routings by the integrated single framework algorithm can save the total costs by 4.5% to 12.4% compared to the routings with the separated level algorithm. Also, it showed that the total costs of the integrated routing framework for different morning and afternoon time windows are 8.28% less than the same routings (identically reversed) for morning and afternoon time window.
Amirreza Nickkar is graduated from the Department of Transportation and Urban Infrastructure Systems at Morgan State University. He is currently working as an adjunct faculty lecturer and researcher at the university’s National Transportation Center (NTC) at Morgan State University. His research interests are in shared mobility, intelligent transportation systems, and transportation optimization
Young-Jae Lee is a Professor of the Department of Transportation and Urban Infrastructure Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. He received his B.S. and M.S. from the Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea and another M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania for optimizing a transit network design problem.
His main research focuses are the improvement of transit systems, intelligent transportation systems, optimizing transportation systems and traffic safety. He has conducted different types of research projects and published papers on improving public transportation systems, including network design, operational efficiency, and ITS application for public transportation as well as ITS and transportation safety.
Currently he is a committee member of the Transportation Research Board Innovative Public Transportation Services and Technologies (AP020), an associate editor of the Korea Society of Civil Engineering (KSCE) Journal of Civil Engineering, and an associate editor of the Urban Rail Transit.
The 4th Street SW separated bike lane project is a one-mile, on-street bicycle facility that connects the Pennsylvania Ave NW cycle track to the Southwest/ Southeast quadrants of Washington, D.C. This project brings the first protected bicycle connection across the National Mall. The project offers a new way to access numerous DC landmarks and connects the downtown central business district in Northwest to neighborhoods such as the Southwest Waterfront and Navy Yard, with popular destinations such as Nationals Park, Audi Field and the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail. This presentation will highlight critical design criteria, multimodal impacts, stakeholder coordination and implementation lessons learned.
Bethany is a transportation engineer based out of the VHB Washington, D.C. office. Currently, she is an embedded on-site engineer in the DDOT Planning and Sustainability Division, working on many of the separated bike lane designs scheduled for construction by 2022. She has a background in traffic operations and safety with 7 years of design experience in the DC area. Bethany is also a member of the National Committee of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (NCUTCD) Bicycle Technical Committee. Bethany is a devoted UVA basketball fan, overall DC sports fan and loves long bike rides on the W&OD Trail or Anacostia Riverwalk Trail.
This talk will wind its way from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to navigating a path to an equitable and accessible autonomous vehicle (AV) transportation network. Safety is a priority, but it should not be the only one. In our enthusiasm to move our transportation system forward, we sometimes neglect the needs of particular populations and even the perspectives of the clear majority of road users. The presentation will discuss the transportation system we have now, the status of our AV-related legal rules and preparations, examples of equitable transportation service models, and the work ahead to ensure accessibility and equity in our future AV transportation network.
Sheryl Gross-Glaser is a writer at Driverless Revolution and a consultant specializing in the accessible and equitable mobility issues. She was the founding director of the National Center for Applied Transit Technology, a federally-funded technical assistance center that supports states and small urban and rural transit agencies to plan for and adopt emerging technologies and transportation services. Ms. Gross-Glaser is a specialist in the development of automated vehicles, shared-use services, and aspects of transportation access for people with disabilities and older adults. She has written and presented around the country about automated vehicles, with in-depth discussion of legislation, regulation, business models, and accessibility and equity.
Ms. Gross-Glaser previously performed technical assistance, outreach, website development, and newsletter editing for the National Center for Mobility Management (NCMM), the Transit Planning 4 All project, and the National Resource Center for Human Service Transportation Coordination. Ms. Gross-Glaser has served on national research, standards, and legal committees, including many that address automated vehicles. Her previous career was in criminal justice, first as a criminal public defender at the appellate level and then as a managing editor of criminal defense publications that examined issues ranging from the death penalty to drug courts to DNA evidence.
New transportation technologies and shared mobility systems have not only disrupted the market but also revolutionized the way mobility is perceived. In order to build more accessible and sustainable future, it is important to investigate how shared mobility is being used, and how socio-demographic and health factors affect users’ behaviors and usage likelihoods. Specifically, a few different modes that include bike-sharing, ride-sourcing, shared automated vehicles (SAVs), and peer-to-peer (P2P) carsharing were evaluated to gain more insights into the heterogeneity of their users. This work applied data-driven analysis to understand perception, adoption, usage, and concerns of emerging technologies and shared mobility. Additionally, the relationship between health and transportation was examined and it was determined how health-related variables impact transportation decisions on an individual level
Natalia Barbour (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of transport and energy at Delft University of Technology and Research Affiliate at MIT. Her research focuses on developing statistical and econometric models to study adoption and usage patterns of new transportation systems and study travel related behaviors and preferences. In the final years of her doctorate she received the outstanding student of the year award and best dissertation award from CTECH at Cornell University. In 2019 she was honored to join NYU’s cohort of Emerging Leaders in Transportation. She holds a doctorate in civil engineering from the University of South Florida and completed her postdoctoral training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The reauthorization of the FAST Act expires in 2021. The FAST Act built upon the previous surface transportation legislation, MAP-21, which was passed in 2012, with minimal changes to the novel MAP-21 requirements for State DOTs and MPOs to begin to utilize quantitative performance measures in the Transportation Planning process. Existing legislation states that consistent performance measurement should help monitor system and agency performance and relate performance to the decision-making process over time. Thus, the next surface transportation authorization should build upon the MAP-21/FAST Act performance measure requirements while maintaining standards to collect and report uniform data. Updating performance measures can support the incoming administration’s focus on climate and energy and further leverage the progress made at the state and regional levels.
This presentation will show results of a 2018 study on how MPOs responded, if at all, to the changes in transportation planning requirements set forth in MAP-21 regarding performance measure development; the effect of Federal mandates; available and desired resources; and data utilization in the planning process. It will then review recent plans and bills from congress and executive branch leaders and present priorities and recommendations for the next federal surface transportation authorization. Lessons learned from this research can inform future efforts to develop and refine performance measures in the transportation planning process.
Alice is currently a Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science working with Social Scientists at NOAA to further the use of Social Data for portfolio analysis and program planning, management, and evaluation.
Prior to her AAAS Fellowship, Alice was a Senior Policy Analyst at the Eno Center for Transportation, an independent non-profit think tank in Washington DC. In that capacity, she managed projects and conducted research in various areas of multimodal transportation with a focus on research relating to vehicle automation, transportation technology platforms, and performance measurement. During her graduate studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology she led and supported projects on performance measure development, electronic travel diaries, active transportation safety, and pedestrian infrastructure asset management and accessibility for people with disabilities.
Alice has also worked with the Pritzker award winning Catalan Architecture firm RCR Arquitectes, as well as with the South Pole Telescope Group at the University of Chicago. She believes strongly in interdisciplinary learning and exchange, and in the importance of diversity in thought, experience, and background.
Alice completed her B.A. at Vassar College in Physics and Astronomy, and her Ph.D. at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Civil Engineering. She is an active member of both the Pedestrian Committee and the Transit Management and Performance Committee of the Transportation Research Board and was named one of Mass Transit’s 40 Under 40 for 2020.