Portland State University

Students at Portland’s Cleveland High School learned on Tuesday that their school sits at the heart of pioneering transportation research. The school is at the corner of Southeast 26^th Avenue and Powell Boulevard, a corridor in which a variety of advanced traffic management technologies have been installed.

Adam Moore, a graduate student in transportation engineering at Portland State University, and Jon Makler, OTREC’s program manager for education and technology transfer, were guest teaching some algebra classes at Cleveland High as part of National Engineering Month.

In Oregon every February, the Business Education Compact helps match thousands of professional engineers who volunteer to teach in classrooms from elementary through high school. The goal is to raise student awareness of the opportunities and rewards of working in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

This is the third year of volunteering for Makler, who developed a lesson plan that describes the many ways that transportation relies on STEM skills, including engineering. After watching helmet cam footage of biking in downtown Portland, students used basic algebra to learn about how traffic signals are timed to make streets safe and efficient for people in cars, on bike or on foot.

But Moore stole the show as he explained how various devices at the intersection of Powell and 26th help manage traffic. Students were...

The 8^th Annual Region X Student Conference was hosted by Oregon State University in Corvallis on Friday and 70 students attended. Conference organizer Jon Mueller said that a surprising number of students from the materials science and economics departments attended and that a significant number of undergraduates from OSU attended parts of the conference.

The conference featured a morning keynote presentation by Galen McGill, manager of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) unit for the Oregon DOT. The students learned about Oregon’s efforts to confront the challenge of scarce financial resources by applying technology to increase the productivity of existing infrastructure. Galen touched on recent advances in technologies such as OnStar and strategies such as Active Traffic Management, which has been adopted in Seattle and will soon be deployed in Oregon.

The late morning and early afternoon showcased student research. Eight students gave lecture-style presentations in the late morning and there was so much interest and so many questions that the session ran late and into the scheduled lunch hour. The presentations – four from PSU and four from OSU – revealed similar research interests between the campuses. The poster session in the afternoon provided a less structured forum in which the participants could interact.

The later afternoon offered students 3 workshops to attend. The group was divided into three subsets, each workshop was...

OTREC students and faculty were active participants in the 15th World Congress on Intelligent Transportation Systems, held in New York City, November 16-20, 2008. Lisa Diercksen, an MS student at PSU presented “A Second Look at the Effectiveness of the Myrtle Creek Dynamic Advanced Curve Warning System;” Jerzy Wieczorek, an MS student in Statistics at PSU presented “Using Archived ITS Data to Automatically Identify Freeway Bottlenecks in Portland, Oregon;” Rafael J. Fernandez-Moctezuma, a Ph.D. student in computer science at PSU presented “Developing an Imputation Strategy for an Archived Data User Service in Portland, Oregon;” Galen McGill of the Oregon Department of Transportation presented “Accuracy in Real-Time Estimation of Travel Time,” co-authored with PSU Prof. Kristin Tufte. Prof. Robert Bertini of PSU also presented: “Empirical Evaluation of Adaptive Ramp Metering Along Two Freeway Corridors in Portland, Oregon;” and “Toward Transport Payment Integration in Portland, Oregon.” Prof. David Porter and Prof. David Kim, of the OSU Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering also attended the Congress. The World Congress is sponsored by ITS AMerica, ERTICO-ITS Europe and ITS Japan.

The video begins at 1:48.

A System-Wide Adaptive Ramp Metering (SWARM) system is being implemented in the Portland metropolitan area and should be operational on all corridors by April 2006. This study entails a before and after evaluation of the operational benefits of the new SWARM system using the existing data, surveillance and communications infrastructure. In particular, the study will quantify system-wide benefits in terms of savings in delay, emissions and fuel consumption and safety improvements on and off the freeway due to the implementation of the ramp metering system. This will aid in the optimal deployment of current SWARM system and will be transferable to other regions as their systems come on line in the future.