Author: sshao45

The Georgia Transportation Institute welcomes Dr. Yafeng Yin to speak at the Spring 2020 Transportation Speaker series. He is a Professor at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He works in the area of transportation systems analysis and modeling, and has published more than 100 refereed papers in leading academic journals. Dr. Yin is the Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Department Editor of Service Science, and Associate Editor of Transportation Science. He also serves on the International Advisory Committee of the International Symposium of Transportation and Traffic Theory (ISTTT). Dr. Yin received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 2002, his master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1996 and 1994 respectively. Prior to his current appointment at the University of Michigan, he was a faculty member at University of Florida between 2005 and 2016, a postdoctoral researcher and then assistant research engineer at University of California at Berkeley between 2002 and 2005. Between 1996 and 1999, he was a lecturer at Tsinghua University. Dr. Yin has received recognition from different institutions, including a Doctoral Mentoring Award from University of Florida, Outstanding Leadership Award by the Chinese Overseas Transportation Association (COTA), and the Stella Dafermos Best Paper Award and the Ryuichi Kitamura Paper Award from Transportation Research Board.

Title: On the Empty Miles in Ride-hailing Systems

Abstract:

Ride-hailing services provided by companies like Uber, Lyft and Didi Chuxing are playing an increasingly important role in meeting mobility needs in many metropolitan areas. Other than delivering passengers from their origin to destination, ride-hailing vehicles generate massive vacant or empty trips from the end of one passenger trip to the start of the next. These vacant trips represent unproductive use of labor supply. They also contribute additional traffic demand and may worsen the traffic conditions in urban networks. In this talk, we will discuss the causes of empty miles in the ride-hailing systems, and introduce the modeling of ride-hailing services to estimate empty miles and capture their impacts on traffic congestion, and then explore countermeasures to reduce empty miles in the systems.

The Georgia Transportation Institute welcomes Dr. Laurie Garrow to speak at the Spring 2020 Transportation Speaker series. She is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Associate Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility (CURAM) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Garrow has published articles on airline passengers’ behavior, discrete choice methods, and travel demand modeling. She is the author of a text entitled Discrete Choice Models of Air Travel Demand: Theory and Application. Among her leadership Dr. Garrow currently serves on the Board of Directors for two organizations: INFORMS and AGIFORS. She has previously served as President of the Transportation Science and Logistics Society of INFORMS and as Chair of the Aviation Applications Section of INFORMS. Dr. Garrow is the recipient of the ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Prize, the CUTC-ARTBA New Faculty Member Award, and an NSF CAREER award. Dr. Garrow has five years of industry experience, including four years as an analyst in the Research and Development Revenue Management Group of United Airlines and one year as an analyst in the Customer Science Unit of Mercer Management Consulting.

If you missed the presentation or want to rewatch or share it, the YouTube link is provided below. You can also review the final report.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/5tf6BtwA2z0

Final Report: http://garrowlab.ce.gatech.edu

Title: How National Urbanization Trends Will Affect Rural Transit Funding and “Trending Urban” Transit Systems in Georgia and the Nation after the 2020 Census

Abstract:

In the U.S., there are two main sources of transit funding administered by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). The amount of FTA funding a transit agency receives depends, in part, on whether the agency serves an area that is designated as rural, small urban, or large urban. These designations are defined using the most recent decennial census. Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of the U.S. population residing in urban areas increased by over 12%. Population forecasts suggest these trends will continue and will be reflected in the 2020 decennial census. In this presentation, we examine how spatial and temporal changes in the U.S. population will impact funding for transit systems in the U.S. after the 2020 decennial census. We use binary logic models and geographic information system (GIS) methods to predict spatial and temporal population changes between 2010 and 2020 and identify which areas of the U.S. will be classified as rural, small urban, or large urban after 2020. We then use this information to forecast funding requirements for the FTA § 5311 and FTA § 5307 programs after the 2020 decennial census and to identify rural areas that could become enveloped into large areas after the 2020 decennial census. The latter is important because rural transit agencies that shift to large urban areas after the 2020 decennial census will lose their ability to use federal funding for operating expenses for two years due to the “100 bus rule.” Results show that amount of additional funding needed for the FTA § 5307 small urban will be $344M–$411M, representing a 28%–33% increase over current levels.

The Georgia Transportation Institute welcomes Dr. Laurie Garrow to speak at the Fall 2019 Transportation Speaker series. She is currently a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Associate Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility (CURAM) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Garrow has published articles on airline passengers’ behavior, discrete choice methods, and travel demand modeling. She is the author of a text entitled Discrete Choice Models of Air Travel Demand: Theory and Application. Among her leadership Dr. Garrow currently serves on the Board of Directors for two organizations: INFORMS and AGIFORS. She has previously served as President of the Transportation Science and Logistics Society of INFORMS and as Chair of the Aviation Applications Section of INFORMS. Dr. Garrow is the recipient of the ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Prize, the CUTC-ARTBA New Faculty Member Award, and an NSF CAREER award. Dr. Garrow has five years of industry experience, including four years as an analyst in the Research and Development Revenue Management Group of United Airlines and one year as an analyst in the Customer Science Unit of Mercer Management Consulting.

The Georgia Transportation Institute welcomes Liz York to speak at the Fall 2019 Transportation Speaker series. She currently serves as Senior Advisor for Buildings and Facilities for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She is a registered architect, and holds a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Architecture, both from the Georgia Institute of Technology. In her 20 years at CDC, she has been a link between public health scientists and facility management experts and has facilitated cross-sector collaborations that improve the health of our food system, our communities and our building by developing cross sector tools like FITWEL. Liz has received two White House awards for Sustainability, been named to the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s Sustainability Who’s Who, and has been recognized by the American Institute of Architects as a Fellow for her work to impact health and well-being by empowering architects to build better environments.

The Georgia Transportation Institute welcomes Dr. Xiaopeng (Shaw) Li to speak at the Fall 2019 Transportation Speaker series. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF). His major research interests include advanced network system and traffic modeling with applications in connected autonomous vehicles, shared mobility, and electric vehicles. He is the first holder of Susan A. Bracken Faculty Fellowship at USF and is a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award. He has served as the PI or a co-PI for a number of federal (NSF, USDOT, USDOE), local (e.g., state DOTs, UTCs, I-4 Corridor Program) and industry grants, amounting to a total budget of $7 million. He has published 58 peer-reviewed journal papers, many of which are in top journals such as Transportation Research Part B, Transportation Science, and Operations Research. He has served as a member on the Transportation Network Modeling Committee (ADB30) and the Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics (AHB45) of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and an Associate Department Editor for IIE Transactions Focused Issue on Operations Engineering and Analytics. Dr. Li received a B.S. degree (2006) in civil engineering with a computer engineering minor from Tsinghua University, China, an M.S. degree (2007) and a Ph.D. (2011) degree in civil engineering along with an M.S. degree (2010) in applied mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign, USA.

If you missed the presentation or want to rewatch or share it, the YouTube link is provided below.

YouTube link: Part 1 https://youtu.be/r_Ghm38COzc

YouTube link: Part 2 https://youtu.be/R38m8TdTZ1Q

The Georgia Transportation Institute welcomes Dr. Samer Hamdar to speak at the Fall 2019 Transportation Speaker series. He is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the George Washington University (GW) where he directs the GW Transportation Program. Dr. Hamdar holds a BE Degree from the American University of Beirut (Lebanon, 2003), a MS Degree from University of Maryland, College-Park (2004), and a PhD degree from Northwestern University (2009). He is the chair of the Transportation Research Board Connected and Automated Vehicle Subcommittee and is a member of the TRB Emergency Evacuation and Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics Committees. In terms of research, Dr. Hamdar has 15 years of experience working on driver behavior modelling, crowd dynamics and traffic safety. He has an international research background participating in projects in Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea and the United States. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award titled: “Collision Prediction and Vehicular Control Using an Episode-Based Modeling Framework”.

If you missed the presentation or want to rewatch or share it, the YouTube link is provided below.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/U5561uSZmZI

On October 4, 2019 Chuck Marohn from Strong Towns will speak on redesigning cities and transportation.

Chuck Marohn is the President and founder of Strong Towns, a growing movement that questions the
fiscal responsibility of sprawl development patterns. He is a civil engineer and city planner whose
early career was spent widening roads and advancing auto-dependency in accordance with what
he’d been taught. He will be interviewed by Ellen Dunham-Jones, Professor of Architecture and Urban
Design, and Kari Watkins, Olmsted Professor of Civil Engineering.

The Georgia Transportation Institute welcomes Joel Leisch to speak at the Fall 2019 Transportation Speaker series.  He has engaged in transportation and traffic engineering with an emphasis on conceptual planning, functional design, geometric design, and traffic operational studies for urban freeway corridors and other high type urban facilities for more than 50 years.  He has been responsible for the planning and design studies of more than 2,000 miles (3,000km) of freeways, toll facilities, and arterials including more than 900 interchanges and 2,000 intersections and roundabouts in major metropolitan areas in 28 states and five foreign countries.  During the past 15 years a number of these projects have incorporated high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) facilities, managed (HOT) lanes, surveillance, and control, and integration with public transportation (BRT or rail) in environmentally and socially sensitive areas.
Mr. Leisch has conducted professional education training seminars, workshops, and programs in highway and traffic planning and design, freeway and interchange planning and design, and intersection and roundabout planning, design and operational analysis for State DOT’s and consultants throughout the USA, and in Canada, Denmark, Japan, Greece, Russia, Ghana and Israel.  He was a visiting lecturer at the Northwestern University Traffic Institute, Purdue University, Penn State University, Georgia Tech, U. of Texas, Texas A&M, University of Idaho, North Carolina State University and the University of California.

If you missed the presentation or want to rewatch or share it, the YouTube link is provided below.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/wfYu9nNMH8k

David Jared, Assistant Office Head, Office of Performance-based Management and Research (OPMR), will be retiring from GDOT with 25 years of service, effective October 1, 2019. David manages GDOT’s research and development program, one of the largest among state DOT’s in the U.S. He plans to work for the Transportation Research Board (TRB) in Washington D.C., a part of the National Academy of Sciences.

A farewell reception will be held at the OMAT Auditorium in Forest Park on September 20, from 10:30 a.m. – noon. Please contact Supriya Kamatkar of OPMR for details (404.347.0552).  

Finally, David wishes to thank all who have supported GDOT’s research program over the years. This broad support has been vital to the success and stature of the program within the AASHTO community.

To RSVP or give a farewell message click here.