University of Washington

Letter from the Director On behalf of PacTrans, our Board, and our staff, I would like to express our heartfelt gratitude for your continued support and partnership over this past year. We had a very busy and exciting past year because of the thrilling win of the mobility-focused regional University Transportation Center (UTC) funded by FAST Act, the successful closure the general- focused UTC funded by SAFETY-LU, and the smooth operation of the safety-focused UTC funded by MAP-21. We will continue to represent the Pacific Northwest as its regional UTC for the next five years, shifting focus from Safety to a new focus in Mobility. To learn from the past operations and serve Region 10 better, PacTrans Board of Directors (BOD) had a retreat in March 2017 to discuss specific steps for the transition and goals for the coming five years. Highlights of our major activities in the 2016-2017 fiscal year are as follows: PacTrans enhanced its regional leadership by adding two educational partners, Gonzaga University (GU) and Boise State University (BSU), into the new consortium established for the FAST Act funded regional UTC. Both GU and BSU are important providers of transportation workforce in Region 10. Our BOD believes that PacTrans can make significant improvements in educational collaborations to better serve our regional needs with these two new partners. PacTrans hosted its Regional Transportation Conference with a record turnout of over 220 attendees, the Region 10 Student Conference with approximately forty attendees, and the Region 10 Reception at the TRB Annual Conference with nearly 200 attendees. We design these events as important venues for communications between researchers and practitioners, networking, and collaborations. These events performed very well in serving these needs. During this past year, PacTrans initiated our final of three research cycles under our second (MAP-21) grant. We received approximately 30 proposal ideas for our large scale, multi-institution projects, of which a dozen were encouraged to submit full proposals for reviewed. Ultimately six large scale, multi-institution projects were funded. We also funded a total of eighteen small scale, single-institution projects to support innovative ideas worth funding for early stage investigation. These twenty-four projects are ongoing now. To facilitate technology transfer, we are also preparing to issue a call for success stories where we offer supplemental funding to PIs who had successful PacTrans funded research projects and have innovative ideas about how to get their findings into the hands of practitioners. PacTrans is steadfast in our devotion to bring meaningful research to real world practicality. On the outreach side, we were able to facilitate over a dozen expert seminars for our students including three quarterly regional transportation seminars and a leadership in transportation seminar. We also provided travel funding to faculty and students who made over 200 presentations and demos at prestigious domestic and international conferences. We provided travel funding for over fifty student researchers from our consortium universities to attend the TRB annual meeting in January in Washington D.C. We supported a handful of student teams including the UW Hyperloop team who won several awards, OSU student chapter of ITE who won first place in the district traffic bowl, and OSU's first ever PacTrans Fellow won the Engineering Student of the Year Award. As we look back over the past year — celebrating our successes and remembering those who have assisted us with our mission — it is with a grateful heart that I thank each and every one of you. Sincerely yours, Yinhai Wang, PhD, Professor DIRECTOR OF PACTRANS 1 2014-2015 Annual Report

• Cover