National Institute for Transportation and Communities

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...

Garrett Stephens, Oregon Institute of Technology

Garrett Stephens is Oregon Tech's 2018-19 ITE Student Chapter President and has held civil engineering internships at Kiewit and Lane County Public Works. He was interested in civil engineering from a young age, and has recently decided to pursue a graduate degree with a focus on transportation.

LinkedIn

Tell us about yourself?

My name is Garrett Stephens and I am from the Clackamas/Damascus area outside of Portland, Oregon. Growing up, my family owned our own retail paint business where I worked when needed and developed a strong sense of ownership in anything I did. My college career started when I was 16 years old through an early college options program between the homeschool program I was enrolled in and Clackamas Community College. This program allowed me to really step out and develop leadership skills through the classes I took. Outside of academia, I am an avid outdoorsman and love all that Oregon has to offer.

What and/or who has most significantly influenced your path in transportation?

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...

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: