Daniel Iwicki, Oregon Institute of Technology
Daniel Iwicki is a civil engineering student and Oregon Tech's ASCE-AGC Student Chapter President. He won a nationwide essay competition in 2018 related to effects of autonomous vehicles on rural areas and was invited to present his work at the National Conference on Rural Public and Intercity Bus Transportation. Daniel has been a NITC Scholar and has represented Oregon Tech and NITC at several events including the TRB Annual Meeting.
LinkedIn | Oregon Tech Profile
Tell us about yourself?
I am a senior civil engineering student at Oregon Institute of Technology. Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, I moved out to Oregon to finish school in 2016. Before arriving at Oregon Tech I wanted to build bridges; I quickly found out that transportation was more my passion. During my first summer in Oregon, I worked as a research assistant on a NITC-funded project and was a co-author for a study on vibration modal analysis of bridges titles Development of RDSETGO: A Rapidly Deployable Structural Evaluation Toolkit for Global Observation. The following school year I took on the role as president...
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Automobile travel is evolving fast. Transportation network companies (TNCs) like Lyft and Uber are already changing...
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Adrian Cottam, University of Arizona
Adrian Cottam is a second year masters student in civil engineering at the University of Arizona. He is a graduate research assistant in the Smart Transportation Lab working under NITC researcher Yao-Jan Wu, and is also an officer in the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) University of Arizona student chapter.
Tell us about yourself?
My name is Adrian Cottam and I am 22 years old. I was born in Tucson, Arizona and have lived there almost my whole life. I was homeschooled for my entire schooling up through high school, which I graduated from at 16 years old. I received my associates degree from Pima Community College in 2016, and continued on to receive my bachelors of science from the University of Arizona in 2018. I am now finishing up my masters degree in Transportation Engineering in May 2019 at the University of Arizona, where I have already started on my Ph.D. When I’m not in the lab I like to go hiking and hang out with friends, or travel. I love to travel, and I have visited 6 other countries so far.
What (or who) has influenced your career path in transportation?
I have always been passionate about STEM...
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We’ve been hosting an annual summit that connects national mobility-focused research to local practice for eleven years now. Registration for Transportation and Communities Summit 2019 is now open, and this year we’re focusing our attention on three key themes: Intersection of Transportation and Housing / Land Use; New Mobility in Active Transportation; and Multimodal Data: Collecting, Processing, Analyzing, and Using.
In exploring the multimodal data theme further, we’re excited to welcome our keynote Ben Wellington—a data scientist and policy analyst from New York, NY. The founder of I Quant NY, his data analysis has influenced local government policy including changes in NYC street infrastructure, the way New Yorkers pay for cabs and the design of NYC subway vending machines, and made it’s way to TEDTalks “Making Data Mean More Through Storytelling” and “How We Found the Worst Place to Park in New York City — using Big Data”.
Across the world, the Open Data movement is growing and more and more cities are releasing data to the public. As citizens push for more...
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Amanda Dillon, University of Utah
Amanda Dillon is a research assistant in the University of Utah's Metropolitan Research Center. She has received both NITC and WTS scholarships, and has recently been hired as a community planner in the urban design studio of MHTN Architects, a major architecture firm in Salt Lake City.
Tell us about yourself?
I’m a second year dual master’s student in city and metropolitan planning and real estate development at the University of Utah. I came to Utah via New York City where I spent 6 years working in the nonprofit sector. Prior to that, I did community development in the U.S. Peace Corps for two and a half years in Mauritania and Mozambique. Utah is an exciting place to study planning, transportation, and development because the population is growing and the built environment is changing so fast. I became interested in transportation and our (unhealthy) relationship with cars at a young age growing up in Los Angeles. Now that I’m in Salt Lake City, I’m focused on researching and creating more sustainable relationships between transportation and land management.
What (or who) has influenced your career path in transportation?
As I mentioned, I grew up in Los Angeles, and went to undergrad in Orange County. I formed my early impressions of transportation...
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The latest NITC report explores strengthening collaboration between disciplines, to build a transportation system that better serves everyone.
Transportation planners and engineers often struggle to serve at-risk communities and environmental justice (EJ) populations. EJ populations can include older adults, people with low income, low socioeconomic status, racial and ethnic minorities, and individuals with disabilities—all groups who are at an increased risk for transportation disadvantage. Evidence of these struggles manifest as unequal transportation system outcomes related to access and opportunity.
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Automobile traffic congestion in urban areas comes with significant economic and social costs for everyone. According to the 2015 Urban Mobility Report, the total additional cost of congestion was $160 billion. As more people move to metropolitan areas, the problems only intensify. The latest NITC report offers a new approach to urban traffic signal control based on network consensus control theory which is computationally efficient, responsive to local congestion, and at the same time has the potential for congestion management at the network level.
Traffic signals represent a significant bottleneck. As...
Read moreAuthored by Stefanie Knowlton, Communications Specialist for the Digital City Testbed Center at Portland State University
With her smart phone in one hand and a leash for her guide dog in the other, Portland State University student Katie Durden tested the latest in indoor navigation to explore the PSU library this week.
“Main Elevator. Six Yards,” said a female voice from her phone.
Durden was one of about 200 people who attended PSU’s Mobility Matters 2019 conference to learn about emerging technology and design to help everyone access safe and reliable transportation. Disability specialists, urban planners, engineers, transportation professionals, students and community members converged to share ideas.
“Today is the day to share your challenges and your frustrations and help each other be more creative in how you approach designing and planning for transportation,” said Jennifer Dill, professor and director of PSU’s Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC), which coordinated the event with the College of Education and support from Digital City Testbed Center.
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The latest NITC report offers improved tools for pedestrian modeling.
Led by Kelly Clifton of Portland State University, researchers had previously created the the MoPeD pedestrian demand model as well as a pedestrian index of the environment (PIE) for forecasting pedestrian travel. The PIE index improved the sensitivity of walk trip models by incorporating contextual features of the built environment that affect walking behavior in the Portland, Oregon region. Read about Clifton's previous body of work on context-specific modeling.
Useful for academic researchers in transportation, Clifton's research provides a framework for incorporating pedestrian travel behavior forecasts into traditional four-step travel demand models.
Since the method was based on Portland, the next step was to adapt the tools for wider use. In this new report, Clifton and Jaime Orrego-Onate of...
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The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) program has released its 2019 general research request for proposals. Faculty at NITC's partner universities* are invited to submit abstracts by March 29, 2019.
Through funding provided by the U.S. DOT, we will award up to $1,000,000 to research projects that support NITC’s theme: improving mobility of people and goods to build strong communities. Our theme includes a few key topics:
- Increasing access to opportunities
- Improving multi-modal planning and shared use of infrastructure
- Advancing innovation and smart cities
- Developing data, models, and tools
2019 RESEARCH PRIORITIES
The NITC Advisory Board has provided input into several research priorities that relate to multimodal transportation data and the transportation-land use-housing connection. NITC is prioritizing the funding of proposals that directly addresses research questions related to:
Developing Data, Models and Tools. Agencies are confronting a plethora of new mobility options along with new data sources to support transportation research, planning, and analysis. Several priority research areas have been identified to increase understanding:
- Collection of multimodal data...