ATAC Student Wins Second Place

Jason Baker, Advanced Traffic Analysis Center research student and a senior in civil engineering, won second place for a presentation at the Educator-Student program of the Highway Engineering Exchange Program.

His paper, presented at the 2003 Area III HEEP conference in Ames, Iowa in May was on the use of innovative traffic analysis methods.

Bismarck school safety study

The Advanced Traffic Analysis Center has just completed an extensive inventory of Bismarck area schools to be used in a city-wide school safety study. The data collection was conducted through a collaboration between ATAC students and a Bismarck State College student. They used GPS technology to accurately collect the data and transform it to GIS.

UGPTI Awarded Federal Contract

The Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute at North Dakota State University has been awarded an $8.7 million five-year contract to maintain and enhance software programs used by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and safety inspectors nationwide, according to Brenda Lantz, director of the Institute's Transportation Safety Systems Center.

The Safety Systems Center is a specialized software development center operated by UGPTI in Lakewood, Colo., to develop and maintain front-end software for state and federal motor carrier safety specialists.

FMSCA, a unit within the U.S. Department of Transportation, maintains highly sophisticated safety information gathering and processing systems to ensure safety of motor carrier operations in the United States. A major part of the agency's field systems includes a group of programs used by safety investigators and inspectors on the highway, at borders and during safety reviews and audits.

Tasks will include developing field system software, preparing software documentation, quality assurance and testing, analysis and technology research, program management, and developing client software applications.

Some of the field systems software packages include roadside driver and vehicle inspection, commercial driver license information access, roadside access to critical carrier information for inspection prioritization, carrier safety profile software, hazardous materials inspection software and field data routing software. These efforts will be enhanced through related research conducted by Lantz and other colleagues at the Transportation Institute. For more information about the program please visit the website at www.ugpti.org/tssc/.