Give Me Shelter: Responding to Milwaukee County's affordable housing challenges

Few issues better capture the complex and controversial nature of urban problems facing Metropolitan Milwaukee than the issue of affordable housing. Encompassing matters of racial segregation, poverty and failed public-private partnerships, the Milwaukee metro area's struggle to provide a safe, decent and affordable supply of housing to low-income citizens has been a difficult one. Even before the national economic meltdown, countless reports documented the severe housing burden facing low-income citizens in Milwaukee County. That burden, combined with the scarcity of affordable housing in suburban parts of southeast Wisconsin, has cemented the region's place as one of the most racially segregated in the country. In today's economy, those problems have intensified

Utilization of Dedicated Electric Vehicle Plug-In Charging Stations in a College Campus Environment

As electric mobility is expanding at a rapid pace, the standardized availability of gas stations compared to a scarcity of charging stations continues to be the greatest challenge for electric vehicles. With cities, university campuses and businesses promoting electric vehicle infrastructure and incentives, it is necessary to develop key performance metrics and visualizations that can track the utilization of the charging infrastructure. This study performs a manual data collection at dedicated plug-in charging stations across Purdue University to assess their utilization. Approximately 2,800 observations were conducted over 50 days across seven level 2 plug-in charging stations. Results showed that for large portion of the observations, vehicles were parked at the spots (40%) but not plugged in. Vehicles plugged in to charging stations accounted for 34% of observations. Charging station spots were vacant for 25% of observations indicating that current infrastructure meets the demand. There were 74 unique vehicles that used the spots, of which 27% were plugged in more than 10 times. Illegally parked vehicles accounted for less than 1% with only 4 repeat offenders who used these spots more than once. As electric deployment continues to increase, performance metrics will be an integral tool for agencies and decision makers to help with the maintenance and expansion of electric vehicle infrastructure

2011 Indiana Interstate Mobility Report—Summary Version

The 2011 Mobility Report—Summary Version introduces the use of crowd sourced probe data collected from vehicles and mobile devices to quantify the location and duration of congestion on Indiana interstates. The report presents a detailed case study of the I-65 corridor, as well as examples of travel time reliability information for sections of Interstates 65, 70, and 94. Summary monthly mobility statistics for all 943 centerline miles of Indiana Interstates 64, 65, 69, 70, 74, 94, and 465 are tabulated in a graphical format to facilitate comparison of mobility along those corridors

Real-Time Probe Data Dashboards for Interstate Performance Monitoring During Winter Weather and Incidents

The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) manages over 1800 centerline miles of interstate that can be profoundly impacted by weather, crashes, and construction. Real-time performance measurement of interstate speeds is critical for successful traffic operations management. Agency managers and Traffic Management Center decision makers need situational awareness of the network and the ability to identify irregularities at a glance in order to manage resources and respond to media queries. One way to access this level of detail is crowdsourced probe vehicle data. Crowdsourced probe vehicle data can be obtained by collecting speed data from cell phones and global positioning system (GPS) devices. In Indiana, approximately 2673 predefined interstate segments are used to generate over 3.8 million speed records per day. These data can be overwhelming without efficient procedures to reduce and aggregate both spatially and temporally. This paper introduces a spatial and temporal aggregation model and an accompanying real-time dashboard to characterize the current and past congestion history of interstate roadways. The primary high level view of the aggregated data resembles a stock ticker and is called the “Congestion Ticker.” The data archive allows for after-action review of major events such as ice storms, major crashes, and construction work zones. The utility of this application is demonstrated with two case studies: a snowstorm that covered northern and central Indiana in February 2015 and an I-70 back of queue crash in April 2015

Development of NASA's Sample Cartridge Assembly: Summary of GEDS Design, Development Testing, and Thermal Analyses

NASA's Sample Cartridge Assembly (SCA) project is responsible for designing and validating a payload that contains materials research samples in a sealed environment. The SCA will be heated in the European Space Agency's (ESA) Low Gradient Furnace (LGF) that is housed inside the Material Science Research Rack (MSRR) located on the International Space Station (ISS). The first Principle Investigator (PI) to utilize the SCA will focus on Gravitational Effects on Distortion in Sintering (GEDS) research. This paper will give a summary of the design and development test effort for the GEDS SCA and will discuss the role of thermal analysis in developing test profiles to meet the science and engineering requirements. Lessons learned will be reviewed and salient design features that may differ for each PI will be discussed

Real-Time Probe Data Dashboard for Monitoring Detour Route during I-65 N Road Closure

On August 7, 2015, a 37 mile stretch of I-65 N from MM 141 to 178 was closed due to a structural evaluation of a bridge. Traffic was detoured onto US-52, SR-26, and US-231 before returning to the highway. In order to monitor delay and congestion on the detour route, a real-time dashboard was implemented in the style of the interstate Traffic Ticker. Throughout the detour, this website was used to monitor congestion in real time and measure the impact of mitigation actions. The improvement in travel can be seen from the addition of temporary signals, retiming of the US-231 corridor, and conversion of US-231 and SR-18 to a two-way stop

Indiana Interstate Speed Profiles 2018–2022

Systemwide interstate performance measures that detail hours and location of congestion on an interstate provide important information for decision makers to plan capital projects and assess operations. This report presents summary of mile-hours of congestion across 8 Indiana interstates and the Indiana toll road. Hours of operation by speed bins (0 to 14 mph, 15 mph to 24 mph, 25 mph to 34 mph, 35 mph to 44 mph, 45 mph to 54 mph, 55 mph to 64 mph, more than 65 mph) for every 0.1 mile of the interstates across a month were tabulated for every hour of every day during the month. The quantities of those six different speed bins are plotted as a stacked bar plot from lower to higher speeds by mile marker for each month. The vertical axis shows the mile marker of the interstate. Horizontally, these stacked bars are cropped at maximum of 250 hours (a little more than 10 days) per month to focus on the lower speeds. To produce these plots, approximately 60 billion records from INRIX across 5 years were analyzed. These speed profiles help identify areas with congestion at system level as well as regions impacted by severe winter storms and construction projects