Planning Group

Chris Pourteau

The WSDOT Express Lanes Project: Research into Practice

Congestion is bad and getting worse across the country. Space for new lanes is limited, and funding for new construction is nearly nonexistent.

The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) is familiar with the quandary. Its Interstate 405/State Route 167 corridor is often congested for 10 hours each work day. The high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes are so popular that carpoolers and transit riders no longer receive the travel-time savings and trip-time reliability they’ve come to rely on. The area is projected to grow by 1 million residents over the next 20 years. Read More

Drive-In Environmental Research Chamber: New TTI testing facility expected to open new doors for research

At the Texas A&M University Riverside Campus in Bryan, Texas, workers have completed the finishing touches on another in a line of world-class testing centers offered by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) to its sponsors.

The Drive-In Environmental Research Chamber, which opens in January 2010, is the largest of its kind in the country. The facility consists of a temperature- and humidity-controlled, 75-by-22-by-22-foot chamber housed in a building that also contains a conference room, offices, control room and vehicle preparation area. It’s large enough that an 18-wheeler with trailer or a bus can easily drive into the facility. Read more

Improved Urban Mobility Report Distributed

The Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s (TTI‘s) 20th Urban Mobility Report (UMR) presents the most accurate picture yet of how much time commuters in 439 metropolitan areas spend in traffic and how much that congestion costs. Released Jan. 20, the report uses GPS-enabled vehicles and mobile devices to monitor traffic speeds with data from INRIX, a leading private-sector provider of traffic information.

“The recent TTI-INRIX collaboration took much of the estimation out of calculating congestion because the data reflect the actual speeds of vehicles,” notes TTI Research Engineer Tim Lomax, lead author of the UMR. “Knowing exactly how fast traffic is moving, we can calculate delays fairly easily with precision not available before.” Read More