Reducing US Transit Costs: An Empirical Review and Comparative Case Study of Portland, Manchester Rail Systems

The cost to build and operate transportation infrastructure, including mass transit, in the United States is consistently higher than it is elsewhere in the developed world. As America’s population becomes increasing urban, addressing this issue will become increasingly important. This study seeks to understand why this cost discrepancy exists, and what to do about it, through a review of existing cost data (using operations costs from the US and International governments, and capital cost data from prior studies) and a comparative case study analysis. Two light rail systems, MAX (in Portland, Oregon) and Metrolink (in Manchester, UK), share many design and operations characteristics, and recently completed two similar capital projects. While MAX’s operations and capital costs are lower than the national average, they remain above comparable costs for Metrolink. This similarity in specifications, combined with a divergence in cost, provides an opportunity to understand why US transit is comparatively expensive.

Blockchain for Preserving Privacy in V2X Connected Vehicle Applications in Urban Environments

C2SMART researchers developed a more efficient, secure, blockchain-based system to story mobility data on a distribute ledger. To store this data at scale, researchers leverage InterPlanetary File System (OPFS), a scalable distributed peer-to-peer data storage system, and develop efficient consensus algorithms to prevent users from injecting malicious or fake trajectories into the ledger.

Work Zone Safety: Virtual reality-based traffic co-simulation platform for workforce training and pedestrian behavior analysis

Building off of the research team’s previous work on a smartwatch alarm application and worker attention monitoring system, this project will expand the scope to a) understand workers’ behaviors to modalities of alarms in real physical work environments, and b) improve the VR based traffic co-simulation platform to co-simulate workers position in SUMO in real time as obstacles to be recognized and calibrate the vehicle trajectories in SUMO through larger work zone/traffic vehicle trajectory datasets.