National Institute for Transportation and Communities

THE NEW PROJECT

Active transportation modes such as bicycling are associated with benefits like lower congestion and emission levels, and improvements in public health. Many cities are interested in increasing bicycle activity, but in order to understand what works, cities require accurate accounting of bicycle traffic. This requires re-thinking the way we conduct estimation methods, data inputs, and modeling techniques.

To that end, a group of local agency partners pooled resources to fund the research project:...

The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) is soliciting proposals for our two 2018 Pooled Fund projects:

Exploring Data Fusion Techniques to Derive Bicycle Volumes on a Network

This project will address the need of cities and municipalities to combine bicycle data from different sources (such as manual counts, automatic counts, and crowd-sourced data from apps such as Strava) to assess an accurate accounting of bicycle traffic on a network. Current work on data fusion techniques is limited and additional research is needed to fully understand the choice of weighting techniques, inclusion of spatial vs. temporal variation in the weighting scheme and exploring other...

Sheida Khademi, University of Texas at Arlington

ITE Student Chapter | LinkedIn

Tell us about yourself:

I was born and raised in Iran, and I have experienced many restrictions that exist for women. My role model has been my mother; she played a pivotal role in helping me overcome challenges in achieving my goals. My family has always valued a good education and we have a deep belief in the power of women to find their way in society. I achieved a top 1% score in one of the most competitive and demanding schools in my country, in a male-dominated major. During my undergraduate years, I found that I have a deep interest in research, with a strong motivation and aptitude for it. I started my master’s degree in transportation engineering at University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) in Fall 2015, and started my PhD in the Fall 2017 semester.

What has influenced your path in transportation?...

The National Institute for Transportation & Communities (NITC) research consortium, led by Portland State University, has awarded $926,000 in total funding for eleven research projects spanning five universities.

The General Research grant is NITC's flagship grant. Annually, we fund general research through a competitive, peer-reviewed RFP process for projects ($30,000 - $150,000) consistent with our theme of improving the mobility of people and goods to build strong communities.

Four of these new projects involve multi-university collaboration, and seven are advancing the transportation knowledge base by building upon an existing body of research. The new group of projects will help lead the deployment of innovative new technologies and practices to improve the safety and performance of transportation systems: