The National Operations Centre of Excellence has announced that a student team from the University of Michigan won the second annual Transportation Technology Tournament, a partnership between NOCoE and the United States Department of Transportation.
The winning team designed a solution to reduce congestion on I-75 and I-696 in the Detroit area.
The tournament took place during the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Annual Meeting in Austin, TX.
The University of Michigan team’s solution focused on mitigating heavy, peak hour traffic volume on I-75 between Detroit and Troy, MI and on east and westbound I-696 in the Detroit suburbs. Their proposal included a supply focused solution managing the flow of vehicles, and a demand focused solution reducing car trips by using shuttles and car-pooling to the area’s major employers, such as General Motors and Chrysler.
Patrick Son, NOCoE’s Managing Director said the Michigan team’s solution was imaginative and completely deployable. ‘These students developed practical solutions to a problem that has stalled Southeast Michigan for decades. There is virtually no room to add capacity, yet the team came up with a suite of ideas that involved TSMO and Intelligent Transportation strategies to create a low cost, workable solution. That’s exactly the kind of ingenuity we need as we address crucial workforce issues ahead,’ said Son.
