University of Washington

Michael Olsen (OSU) Provision of adequate Sight Distance (SD) is a key component in the safe design, operation, and maintenance of highways. Conventional fi eld measurements of SD that present safety concerns, are generally time consuming, labor intensive, are 2D, and do not consider the wide range of vehicles present on the road. In a prior Pactrans small project, Dr. Olsen's research team developed a 3D virtual visibility sight distance analysis algorithm using lidar data. While the results of the prior project developed an algorithm that the research team was able to successfully analyze a wide range of scenarios, they PACTRANS CONSORTIUM MEMBER UAF PARTNERS WITH STORYCORPS Early this year, PacTrans consortium member, the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), partnered with StoryCorps, an independent non-profi t project, whose mission is to honor and celebrate the lives of everyday Americans by listening to their stories. The UAF's role in the collaboration was leading and recording science-based stories and dialogues. PacTrans PI and University of Alaska Assistant Professor, Nathan Belz, had the opportunity to record conversations related to transportation. This partnership evidently blossomed into an NSF proposal in which Belz played the role of a thematic leader in charge of coordinating and condensing conversations based in engineering, technology, and energy, hoping to identify common themes in regards to research needs, and ultimately, make an impact on transportation systems, to which PacTrans believes is a top priority in our world today. 2018 TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD (TRB) ANNUAL MEETING The Transportation Research Board (TRB) 97th Annual Meeting was held last January 7–11, 2018, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, in Washington, D.C., with the spotlight theme of "Transportation: Moving the Economy of the Future." The event attracted more than 12,000 transportation professionals from around the world. Those professionals hosted more than 5,000 presentations in nearly 800 sessions and workshops. The TRB annual meeting continues to be an excellent forum for PacTrans to demonstrate its abilities, expertise, innovations, and research, and as one of the country's leading regional University Transportation Centers (UTCs). PacTrans student and faculty researchers from all the seven consortium-member Universities were in active attendance and participated in over 120 lecterns, poster sessions, workshops, committees, and subcommittees, and submitted over 100 papers to the 2018 TRB meeting. believe the developed algorithm has a great potential for supporting evaluation of SD constraints for many transportation agencies worldwide. To promote wider distribution and rapid dissemination of the program, success story funds were used to enable cleanup, optimization, packaging, and dissemination of the code into an easy to use program with a simple, yet powerful, graphical user interface (GUI) that can readily be used by a typical transportation engineer in their workfl ows. 27 2017 – 2018 Annual Report

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