Feature Channels: Travel and Transportation

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A multidisciplinary research team from Michigan State University will use a $2.49 million grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a four-year study examining the impacts of autonomous vehicles on the future workforce. Shelia Cotten, professor in the Department of Media and Information, who is a leading expert on the use and impacts of emerging technologies, will lead the team, which will draw from organizational psychology, economics, sociology, geography, technology and transportation engineering.

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Are you willing to ride in a driverless car? Researchers at the University of Washington studied how Americans’ perceived cost of commute time changes depending on who’s driving.

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More than 1/2 of parents say their child has probably been in an unsafe situation as a passenger with a teen driver.

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It now appears that pooled-ride services like car-pooling, public transit, and ride-splitting are much more important than self-driving cars and automation for sustainability and reducing traffic congestion. The idea is simple: put more people in fewer vehicles. Even modest levels of ride-pooling can result in significant energy savings. Increasing vehicle occupancy, especially during peak times, also can significantly reduce traffic congestion. These systems don’t require self-driving vehicles but simply centralized fleet coordination, which is achievable with today’s technologies.

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A 2019 Airline Water Study released by DietDetective.com and the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center reveals that the quality of drinking water varies by airline, and many airlines have possibly provided passengers with unhealthy water.

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Wichita State's Dean Headley, co-author of the Airline Quality Rating, says travelers should book their holiday air travel early this year.

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The University of Illinois at Chicago’s 2019 Urban Forum, titled "Are we there yet? The myths and realities of autonomous vehicles," will examine the questions and uncertainties surrounding not only the societal and legislative impact of autonomous vehicles, but also the technological advances needed for these vehicles to proliferate.

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Carsickness incidence could increase if we all become passengers, but new research aims to help address that.

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You don't think it could happen to you, but the stories in the news show it can. Nearly 40 children die every year from being left in a parked car, and a majority of them are parents just forgetting their child was in the car. Dr. Brian Johnston, chief of pediatrics at Harborview Medical Center, says temperatures can rise quickly in minutes if a car is sitting in the sun, even if it's only 70 or 80 degrees outside. A simple way to remind yourself to look in the backseat before getting out is to leave your cell phone there.

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Securing the global supply chain, while ensuring its smooth functioning, is essential to U.S. national security. S&T and Israel’s Ministry of Public Security teamed up to tackle that issue through the Low Cost Disposable Electronic Seals Pilot.

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People think of electric scooters, or e-scooters, as environmentally friendly ways to get around town. But a new study from North Carolina State University finds it's not that simple: shared e-scooters may be greener than most cars, but they can be less green than several other options.

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New Launch Event

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Special permeable concrete pavement can help reduce the “urban heat island effect” that causes cities to sizzle in the summer, according to a Rutgers-led team of engineers. Their study appears in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

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With more senior drivers on the road than in years past, the importance of assessing driver fitness has increased. In the latest issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, researchers look at this topic along with tools that clinicians can use to determine if patients are able to safely operate a vehicle.

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In a future when self-driving and other internet-connected cars share the roads with the rest of us, hackers could not only wreck the occasional vehicle but possibly compound attacks to gridlock whole cities by stalling out a limited percentage of connected cars. Physicists calculated how many stalled cars would cause how much mayhem.

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Traffic signals serve to regulate the worst bottlenecks in highly populated areas but are not always very effective. Researchers at Penn State are hoping to use deep reinforcement learning to improve traffic signal efficiency in urban areas, thanks to a one-year, $22,443 Penn State Institute for CyberScience Seed Grant.

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Allowing airlines to form international alliances leads to lower fares for passengers who combine two aligned carriers in making an overseas trip, according to a new study led by the University of California, Irvine.

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The arrival of ridehailing is associated with an increase of approximately 3 percent in the number of motor vehicle fatalities and fatal accidents, according to research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

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Irvine, Calif., July 1, 2019 – The nations that have signed agreements to stabilize the global mean temperature by 2050 will fail to meet their goals unless existing fossil fuel-burning infrastructure around the world is retired early, according to a study – published today in Nature – by researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions.

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Injury prevention experts at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt hope the state’s newest law banning cellphone use while driving will have an impact.

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People agree that bike commuting improves health, reduces air pollution and eases traffic. But that knowledge wasn’t enough to get most people to commute by bike. New research indicates that a person’s neighborhood may play a large role in influencing the decision to commute by bike. The study could give regional planners clues about how to design neighborhoods, streets and bike trails.

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A hitch-mounted, cinema-quality camera on a pick-up truck can make bridge inspections safer and faster, developed by the Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) and Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT).

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QuickRoute uses GPS and routing data to provide turn-by-turn directions, and it features an alerting mechanism to warn responders of hazards along the route, such as a flooded road, an accident, or downed power lines.

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Researchers from UBC Okanagan have determined motorists tended to give cyclists wearing high-visibility vests more room on the road, compared to cyclists without high-visibility clothing.

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A tragic trio of inexperience, strong emotions and distractions combines to make vehicle crashes the leading cause of death and disability among American teenagers.

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A new UCI-led pilot study finds, on average, Waze "crash alerts" occur two minutes and 41 seconds prior to their corresponding California Highway Patrol (CHP)-reported crash. These minutes could mean the difference between life and death.

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A fleet of driverless cars working together to keep traffic moving smoothly can improve overall traffic flow by at least 35 percent, researchers have shown.

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Teen drivers diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are significantly more likely to crash, be issued traffic and moving violations, and engage in risky driving behaviors than their peers without ADHD.

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A distracted driving survey of millennial parents (ages 22 to 37) and older parents (37 and up) shows that most parents had read and written texts while driving in the part 30 days but millennial parents

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Work and his collaborators tested seven different cars from two manufacturers on a remote, rural roadway in Arizona. They simulated various driving conditions with a pace car changing its speed, followed by a vehicle using adaptive cruise control. The team measured how quickly and aggressively the ACC system responded to the pace car speed changes.

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A Michigan Tech engineer has created a method to fill in the gaps of available connected vehicle data, which will give transportation planners a more accurate picture of traffic in their cities. It is also a more cost-effective data gathering system than what is currently available.

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The benefits of self-driving cars will likely induce vehicle owners to drive more, and those extra miles could partially or completely offset the potential energy-saving benefits that automation may provide, according to a new University of Michigan study.

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As teens prepare to leave home for college or live on their own in a new city, many may also be using ride sharing services for the first time – and that raises safety concerns for many parents – a new national poll suggests.

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Texas State’s Zhijie Sasha Dong, assistant professor, Ingram School of Engineering and graduate student Lingyu Meng look to close the gap between public bike systems and bike sharing systems in big cities like Nanjing, the capital of China’s Jiangsu Province.

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In the 1960s animated sitcom The Jetsons, George Jetson commutes to work in his family-size flying car, which miraculously transforms into a briefcase at the end of the trip.

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Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is a life-sustaining therapy for patients with respiratory or circulatory failure that is best performed at high-volume centers with special expertise. A survey providing an overview of leading ECMO transport programs around the world is presented in the ASAIO Journal, official journal of ASAIO. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

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The 29th annual Airline Quality Rating (AQR), the longest running and most comprehensive study of the performance quality of the largest airlines in the United States, will be announced via a nationally distributed news release on Monday, April 8, at 3:01 a.m. EDT.

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At USC, researchers have published a new study that tackles a long-standing problem for autonomous vehicle developers: testing the system’s perception algorithms, which allow the car to “understand” what it “sees.”

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Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory received nearly $3.2 million for their proposal on the use of distributed sensing and high-performance computing to reduce traffic congestion while minimizing energy consumption and emissions in and around Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

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Individuals have as big a role to play in tackling climate change as major corporations but only if they can be encouraged to make significant lifestyle changes by effective government policy

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Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a software tool that uses supercomputing resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center to accurately simulate traffic flow throughout the San Francisco Bay Area road networks and provide estimates of the associated congestion, energy usage, and productivity loss.

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In this issue, find research on texting while driving laws, new data on Yoga use increasing, dairy milk in school breakfasts, pregnancy outcomes in prison and more.

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Caterpillar Inc. and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are joining forces to research heavy-duty diesel engines.

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Cities could ease congestion and improve safety during snowstorms by tweaking the timing of traffic lights to take road conditions into account.