CETOC Consortium members

UNO Transportation Institute, Department of Planning and Urban Studies, UNO

The UNO Transportation Institute (UNOTI) provides educational, service, and research initiatives incorporating both passenger and freight systems serving the New Orleans region, the Gulf Coast, the United States, and the world. The Institute promotes innovative policies and practices for the users and providers of transportation through academic programs, theoretical and applied research, outreach activities, as well as strategic partnerships with both the public and private sectors. The UNO Transportation Institute uses interdisciplinary collaboration to maximize its impact. UNOTI offers research, professional outreach, and education programs. Students can pursue transportation studies through a variety of degree programs including our innovative Master of Science in Transportation professional program, an interdisciplinary Ph.D., etc. UNOTI core expertise includes policy for sustainable, resilient, and safe transport systems, specifically relating to maritime and port planning, transit planning, walking, bicycling and transit-oriented development. UNOTI has played an instrumental role in the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. We are leading contributors to local, regional, national, and international sponsored research projects and our faculty and staff serve on many professional boards and organizations, including the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies.
 

Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, FAU

The Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions (CUES) focuses on urban and environmental issues confronting society. CUES transportation planning research provides thought leadership in transit-oriented development, transportation resilience, sea-level rise impacts on transportation planning, and improving transportation infrastructure for students. In addition, the Center works with policymakers and the public and private sectors to promote responsible community development and redevelopment, preserve natural systems, and ensure economic prosperity. CUES resides within the Department of Urban and Regional Planning (URP) in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. CUES has been operating for 50 years, since 1972. Located on the main campus at Boca Raton, CUES and URP offer four state-of-the-art multimedia computer labs equipped with large-format touch-screen monitors, an interactive teaching laboratory, geographic information systems laboratory, plotters, and other up-to-date computing hardware and software. In addition, CUES has been working on building virtual reality applications and mobility-as-a-service applications that apply to the transportation field. Servers for those projects are in our facilities and on cloud computing. The computing facilities within CUES/URP account for approximately 8,000 SF with about 50 computer stations and a large interactive teaching podium.
 

Metropolitan Research Center, Department of City and Metropolitan Planning, UU

The Metropolitan Research Center's mission is to conduct pioneering research that responds to pressing public issues by providing evidence locally and nationally to improve decisions affecting the built environment and access to opportunity. The Center's vision is to be a leading and trusted center for the production and dissemination of evidence-driven research in the interdisciplinary field of planning. Since its founding in 2010, the MRC has produced about 80 peer-reviewed articles focusing on transportation and related topics. Its clients have included HUD, NIH, the Bloomberg Philanthropies, the California Air Resources Board, the Utah Department of Transportation, the Utah Transit Authority, the Wasatch Front Regional Council, the City of Salt Lake's Transportation Division, the New York City Department of Transportation, and many others. Among the breakthrough research activities of the MRC are the mixed use development (MXD) transportation impact models widely used in the western United States, the sprawl/compactness/urban form indices widely used to estimate the various costs of sprawl, the transit land use multiplier studies that dominate the current literature, and the TOD trip and parking generation studies that show that exemplary TODs generate about half as many vehicle trips and half as many parked cars as otherwise comparable suburban sprawl developments.
 

Transportation Research Center, Department of Civil Engineering, CU Denver

The Transportation Research Center at CU Denver provides access to software such as TransCAD, VisSim, and TransModeler as well as hardware such as 10 speed radar guns, 4 vehicle counters, and an Eco-counter that can identify bicyclists in mixed traffic. The Center recently acquired a GeoSLAM ZEB Locate high-density mobile LiDAR backpack that, combined with the resources of our Trimble Technology Lab, facilitates the ability to measure transportation infrastructure accurately, quickly, and easily. Our Trimble Technology Lab is a state-of-the-art technology lab that includes a TX8 3D laser scanner, Trimble SiteVision™ AR system, R12 GNSS systems, Juno 5D handheld scanner, Geo 7x mobile GNSS data collectors, robotic total stations, and field tablets. Advanced software solutions include RealWorks® scanning software and the company’s popular 3D modeling software, SketchUp Pro. For data intensive research, our Big Data Management and Mining Lab (BDLab) facilitates access to data mining and management applications. The lab is equipped with a PowerEdge R920 Geospatial Database Server (2x Intel Xeon E7-4820 v2 Processor, 16GB RDIMM memory, and 4TB of SSD and SAS storage), five XPS 8700 workstations each with 16GB Dual Channel DDR3 memory and 2TB SATA HDD, and a 16-node cluster with two NVIDIA TeslaGPGPUs. This includes access to machine learning and deep learning resources such as the Deep learning developer's box (one Intel Core i9-7900X processor, 128GB DDR4 memory, 1TB SSD, and 10TB hard disk drive).
 

SERMOS Lab, JGT Lab, and the University of Florida Transportation Institute, Department of Civil and Coastal Engineering, UF

The Smart, Equitable, Resilient Mobility Systems (SERMOS) Lab is led by Dr. Xilei Zhao. It invents and applies computational and data science methods to create smart, equitable, resilient mobility systems. Its interdisciplinary team is made up of transportation engineers, urban planners, computer scientists, and industrial and operations engineers. Its expertise includes: big data analytics and travel behavior modeling for emerging travel modes (e.g., ride-hailing and micromobility); modeling and planning evacuation; quantifying resilience for critical infrastructure systems, societal systems, and communities. The Just & Green Transportation (JGT) Lab, led by Dr. Jacob Yan, focuses on using data science and artificial intelligence (machine learning) to make transportation more equitable and sustainable. JGT works closely with public agencies and industry partners to develop intelligent decision-support tools that can help them better plan for and manage new mobility systems such as shared e-scooters. The proposed work will also be supported by the University of Florida Transportation Institute (UFTI), which brings together faculty, staff, and students from many diverse backgrounds to provide solutions to a variety of transportation problems. UFTI hosts several other transportation-related centers within the University of Florida. It hosts McTrans, the largest transportation dissemination center in the world, and the Transportation Technology Transfer (T2) Center, which provides training and technical assistance to professionals around the country and internationally.

Minority-Serving Institution

Florida Atlantic University is the Minority Serving Institution (MSI) and Hispanic Serving Institution of CETOC (https://www.transportation.gov/utc/hbcu-tcu-msi-utcs-under-bil). As an MSI and the most diverse public university in the state, Florida Atlantic University prioritizes research serving a broad constituency. FAU’s Pell-eligible, first-generation, African-American, and Hispanic students outperform the university’s overall retention and graduation rates. In 2017, as the #1 doctoral-level university nationwide for undergraduate research opportunities, FAU undergraduates participated in over 6,000 research activities. 

Florida Atlantic University prioritizes transportation research serving a broad constituency. For example, a current, externally funded project, Improving South Florida’s Transit Ecosystem for Students, seeks to improve educational outcomes for students across three highly diverse educational institutions. The project required a substantial percentage (>30%) of low-income students (defined as Pell recipients) and/or students of color, as well as primarily educating students from their home city. With the UTC fund, future research will extend this effort regionally or nationally. The lessons and programs at FAU will not stop at FAU; they will be applied to other members in the UTC.