Skip to main content

University of Michigan wins Transportation Technology Tournament

A team from the University of Michigan has won the Transportation Technology Tournament for designing a solution to reduce congestion on two interstate highways in the Detroit area. The team presented their solution, Corridor Management in the I-75/I-696 Influence Area, to a panel of judges during a tournament which took place during the Institute of Transportation Engineers annual meeting in Austin, Texas. It focused on mitigating heavy, peak hour traffic volume on I-75 between Detroit and Troy, as
July 25, 2019 Read time: 2 mins
A team from the 5594 University of Michigan has won the Transportation Technology Tournament for designing a solution to reduce congestion on two interstate highways in the Detroit area.


The team presented their solution, Corridor Management in the I-75/I-696 Influence Area, to a panel of judges during a tournament which took place during the 5667 Institute of Transportation Engineers annual meeting in Austin, Texas.

It focused on mitigating heavy, peak hour traffic volume on I-75 between Detroit and Troy, as well as on the east and westbound I-696 in the Detroit suburbs. The proposal included a supply focused solution for managing the flow of vehicles and a demand focused solution for reducing car trips by using shuttles and car-pooling to the area’s major employers, such as 948 General Motors and 1958 Chrysler.  

The annual Transportation Technology Tournament stems from a partnership between the National Operations Center of Excellence (NOCoE) and the US Department of Transportation.

Patrick Son, NOCoE’s managing director said the students developed practical solutions to a problem that has “stalled Southeast Michigan for decades”.

“There is virtually no room to add capacity, yet the team came up with a suite of ideas that involved TSMO and Intelligent Transportation strategies to create a low cost, workable solution,” he added.

Aside from the University of Michigan, the other finalists were the Florida International University, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and two teams from the University of South Florida.

UTC

Related Content

  • July 24, 2017
    Truck platooning trials take to the highways
    There is rising enthusiasm in America and beyond for the concept of truck platooning with trials being planned in several US states, as David Crawford reports. Growing numbers of US states are considering or implementing plans for trials of electronically-linked truck platooning on public road networks. This is in response to the interest being shown by the US$70bn a year road freight industry, where fuel represents 41% of the operating costs making the prospect of improving fuel economy by trucks travellin
  • April 30, 2015
    Cable cars come of age in trans-continental expansion
    David Crawford explores a high-level option of public transport. Sharing its origin with that of ski lifts at winter sports resorts in the European Alps, urban aerial cable transport is attracting growing interest as a low-footprint, low-energy alternative to conventional public transport that can swoop over ground-level traffic congestion.
  • August 13, 2015
    Syracuse models post-industrial revival for US cities
    A connective corridor in Syracuse, New York State, could be a model for other post-industrial cities, as David Crawford discovers. The aim of the city of Syracuse’ 5.6km-long Connective Corridor in Onandaga County in upstate New York is to create a model ‘complete street’ for use in wider regeneration schemes. Key transport-sector components are traffic calming, high-quality transit with accessible passenger information, plus walkability and bike-friendliness.
  • February 25, 2015
    San Francisco plans express lane network across Bay Area
    Colin Sowman looks at plans to convert 240km (150 miles) of HOV/car pool lanes. While some authorities have debated the conversion of high occupancy vehicle lanes (HOV) into express or managed lanes allowing toll paying single-occupant vehicles to avoid congestion, San Francisco’s Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) has acted. It is converting 240km (150 miles) of HOV/car pool lanes to express lanes and last fall the MTC’s Bay Area Infrastructure Financing Authority selected TransCore to d