CE321 Field Trip to Los Osos Valley Road Interchange Project

We had a great field trip hosted by Kyle Rowland from the City of San Luis Obispo at the construction site of the Los Osos Valley Road Interchange with U.S. 101 on October 31, 2015. The CE 321 Fundamentals of Transportation Engineering class learned about all of the issues involved with building a new bridge across U.S. 101, extending a multiplate superspan triple culvert on San Luis Creek, construction of retaining walls, traffic control, stormwater management and more. Thanks to Kyle for a great experience!

CE424 Public Transportation Field Trip to Santa Barbara

Thanks to Eugene Jud for arranging his traditional Amtrak trip to Santa Barbara as a field trip for CE 424 Public Transportation on Saturday October 24, 2015. We are grateful to colleagues at the MTD, and UCSB for their wonderful hospitality. We rode the train, electric trolley, express bus, local bus as well as bicycles on this multimodal trip! We also experienced bicycle roundabouts and several highway roundabouts, all working smoothly! We saw a few skateboards, surfboards and sailboats as well!

SOLARIS Advisory Board, University of Nevada Reno

I am grateful to Prof. Zong Tian for the invitation to serve on the Advisory Board for the Safety and Operations of Large-Area Rural/Urban Intermodal Systems (SOLARIS) Institute which is a Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC) based at the University of Nevada Reno. SOLARIS focuses on safety as the strategic focus area, supported by a broad spectrum of other transportation-related fields. I had the opportunity to visit the Institute and meet with the other advisory board members, faculty and staff on October 16, 2015. An exciting year of research, education and outreach surely lies ahead!

North America PTV Vision User Group Meeting, Portland, Oregon October 13, 2015

I appreciated the invitation to deliver one of the keynote presentations at the North America PTV Vision User Group Meeting, Portland, Oregon October 13, 2015. I was asked to speak about the new Transportation Research Board Task Force on Transportation System Simulation and our efforts to create a Transportation System Simulation Manual. I especially enjoyed seeing former PSU students Ning Zhou (City of Portland), Chengxin Dai (HDR), Matt Dorado (Clark County, WA), and Joe Kirkland (HDR). Thanks to PTV for the invitation!