Announcing the 3rd Annual YPT Award Winners!
First, we want to congratulate Bridgette Carbajal and her team for winning the Young Professionals Transportation Project of the Year Award.
The California Road Charge Pilot Program
The team of young professionals from CalTrans including Brady Tacdol, Nadiya Chumak, Bridgette Carbajal, Deanne Gabrik and Stephanie Sanfilippo implemented a 5,000 participant road charge pilot project to inform a potential alternative to the state gas tax to finance transportation projects. California’s Road Charge Pilot Program is the largest pilot to-date, offering participants the option to choose from one-of-six manual to automated reporting methods.
Second, we want to congratulate Sam Blanchard for winning the Young Professionals Excellence in Innovation/Research of the Year Award.
For his Masters Thesis at UC Berkeley, Sam developed an open source tool called UrbanAccess, that can be used to create multi-modal transportation networks for use in multi-scale (e.g. address to metropolitan scale) transit accessibility analyses.
UrbanAccess provides a generalized, computationally efficient, and unified accessibility calculation framework by linking tools for:
1) network data acquisition, validation, and processing from disparate General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data to represent the transit network and OpenStreetMap data to represent the pedestrian network;
2) computing an integrated pedestrian and transit travel time weighted network graph; and
3) computing network accessibility metrics. Example of typical use cases include measuring the total number of jobs accessible in a metropolitan region at the Census block by transit at a particular time of day or measure the change in accessibility resulting from planned transit improvement projects.
UrbanAccess will be made available for free public use in February. This research will be presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board and a portion will be published in the Transportation Research Record.
Each winning team will receive a happy hour at their local chapter sponsored by YPT International, a plaque recognizing their achievement, and a year of free YPT membership. Every application we received was outstanding, and we hope we will see even more applications next year!
Please join us in congratulating our winners!