Transportation Trajectories
About Transportation Trajectories
Featuring Volpe Center experts, Transportation Trajectories is a dialogue on advancing transportation innovation for the public good. The transportation community is invited to join the conversation as Volpe Center staff describe their work and share their knowledge of the transportation enterprise.
The Volpe Center team represents a world class transportation resource with multi-disciplinary capabilities in all modes of transportation. The expertise of Volpe Center's staff spans a wide range of disciplines—staff include civil, electrical, mechanical aeronautical engineers, physical and social scientists, human factors experts, economists, planners, information technologists, and safety operation specialists to name a few.
Transportation Trajectories events are held at the Volpe Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and are also accessible via webinar.
Next in the Series
Thursday, February 28, 2013
12 noon - 12:30 p.m. EST
Transporation Trajectories with
Terry Sheehan
Regional Emergency Transportation Representative for Massachusetts,
Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire
U.S. Department of Transportation
Volpe, the National Transportation Systems Center
Lessons Learned from Sandy, Irene and Katrina: Restoring Normalcy to the Transportation System through Effective Emergency Response
Recent Dialogues
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Cracked Up—Broken Rails are Serious Business
David Jeong,
Senior Mechanical Engineer, Center for Infrastructure Systems and Engineering at Volpe Center
"...32% of these crack-caused accidents are caused by broken rails or joints on main line tracks in the USA... So the national average is basically one broken rail per hundred miles. So you input this into the algorithm, based on some of the assumptions that we embedded into the algorithm, and it will tell you how many rail tests to perform in the next year..."
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Advancing Aircraft Wake Turbulence Research to Achieve Aviation Capacity and Safety Objectives
Steven Lang,
Director, Center for Air Traffic Systems and Operations at the Volpe Center
"...One size does not fit all: people who fly frequently will notice that the airport, if you fly into Boston, is completely different than that at Dulles. The runways are set up differently, the approach ends are different, there are staggers between them—all of these things factor into wake turbulence research."
November 14, 2012
Better Means to Anticipate What May Go Wrong
Qi Van Eikema Hommes,
Senior Electronics Engineer, Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies at Volpe
"….cars today have turned into very complex electronic control systems… when I say 'hazard,' it means system states—a state of the system that, when combined with the worst condition in the environment, will lead to an accident. So 'hazard analysis' is how to identify how can a system get into such a hazardous state. And the goal of hazard analysis is to try to see what could have caused an accident to happen before the accident actually happens, so you could prevent that…"
July 24, 2012
The Challenge of Transportation Planning for Megaregions
"Megaregions are better adapted to deal with global economic opportunities...It's very difficult for individual states and for individual metropolitan areas or cities to be global players. There's a concern about the U.S.'s role in the international global economy, and megaregions fits into that directly. Often with a megaregions scope, it allows a broader consideration of things like mobility beyond the legally defined boarders, employment and opportunities that do correspond to these larger scale regions; and, as we've seen from the case studies, many, many opportunities for innovation."
William M. Lyons,
Principal Technical Advisor for Transportation Planning at the Volpe Center
June 26, 2012
Automated Vehicles - Coming Soon to a Driveway Near You?
"What's driving forward vehicle automation? There's a number of things….for convenience, there is the thought that for some driving is the distraction. People do not want to commit themselves to driving. They want to have more productive time in their vehicles than traffic…..they want to avoid the monotony of driving which can sometimes be,….and some just want to avoid stress and like to be chauffeured. From the DOT point of view, traffic safety is of utmost concern. The driver, as you can see, is the final frontier in some regards in terms of advancing safety….Clearly at this point we are at the point of having to address the driver...."
Gary Ritter,
Director of the Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies at Volpe Center
March 22, 2012
Weaving silos into tapestry: Cross-modal safety through the U.S. DOT Safety Council
"…Secretary LaHood came in and wanted to reconstitute the Safety Council. For two primary purposes: …he really thought there should be a forum within the department that could bring up and talk about issues like [driver] distraction…which were cross modal in nature and had a real significant safety impact… And then there was the idea of really trying to enforce a safety culture within the department…"
Stephen M. Popkin, Ph.D.,
Director of the Center of Human Factors Research and System Applications at the Volpe Center
February 28, 2012
Aiming High with Alternative Jet Fuels
"So, what will the future look like for alternative fuels in aviation? I think one of the big answers is there is no silver bullet – there is no one feedstock – there is no one fuel that is going to answer our question. For biofuels to be part of the transportation fuel solution we need to go as the old adage says, think globally and act locally."
Kristin C. Lewis, Ph.D.,
Environmental Biologist
Environmental and Energy Systems Technical Center at the Volpe Center
February 14, 2012
Cyber Security in Transportation: Hype or Armageddon?
"Cyber security is one of the most active topics in transportation today…virtually, all our transportation modes are becoming more and more dependent on information technologies, on networks, on GPS, and wireless communications……and while the attacks are getting more sophisticated, the knowledge required to mount those attacks has been reduced drastically….So, we need to develop a much better understanding of the information systems that we have in transportation, their interdependencies, and really understand how important they are in our operations."
Michael Dinning,
Director of the Transportation Logistics and Security Technical Center at the Volpe Center
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Global Initiatives for Green Aviation
"What is really driving this desire and need for green aviation?...not to diminish environmental issues like noise and local air quality…in terms of drivers, the key driver is fuel burn, the number two driver is fuel burn, the number three driver is fuel burn."
Gregg Fleming,
Director of the Center for Environmental and Energy Systems at the Volpe Center
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
The World's Most Extensive Real World Deployment of Connected Vehicle Safety
"The goals and the purpose of this research program is actually to develop safety applications that are used on highways for communicating between vehicles and between infrastructure as well… the idea is that the vehicles are emitting information to surrounding vehicles and surrounding infrastructure about themselves and that allows the infrastructure and other vehicles, wireless devices, drivers, operators, to see this information, process it and then it is utilized in these safety applications to actually improve crash safety on the highways."
Kevin Gay,
Senior Operations Research Analyst and Safety Pilot Program Team Member at the Volpe Center.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Recent Developments in Positioning, Navigation and Timing
"As we have increased accuracy of the Global Positioning System, the applications have just exploded. I don't think anyone knows how many users of GPS there are around the world – I've heard a billion plus…. And the number of applications - we hear about new applications for GPS every single week. A lot of us think about the navigation function, and that is certainly very key for transportation, but GPS is probably used just as much for timing. So all of the communication networks, banking, finance, power grids are really taking advantage of the accurate GPS timing signal and those become the invisible applications that we often don't think about."
Karen Van Dyke,
Principal Technical Advisor on Global Positioning Systems at the Volpe Center and Director of Positioning, Navigation and Timing at the Research and Innovation Technology Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation
