Out of the dozens of Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellows selected to present at the Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) 99th Annual Meeting, a UCLA student took home top honors.

Cassie Halls, a second-year MURP graduate student won the “Best Master’s Student Poster Presentation” for the 2020 Transportation Research Showcase.

 

 

The poster showcased a case study conducted by Halls and fellow Bruin Emma Huang MPP ’17 from LA Metro’s Office of Extraordinary Innovation on the Flower Street Bus-Only Lane piloted in downtown Los Angeles. The study measured the impact of the tactical transit lane based on bus travel times, corridor-level throughput, and customer and operator experience. The analysis found up to 27 percent travel time savings between the pre- and post-pilot period along high-performing street segments, and 17 percent average travel time savings along the entire bus-only lane. Upwards of 16,000 bus riders a day benefitted from time savings on the bus lane during the mid-pilot period. A full case study will be published later this year.

 

In other news…

UCLA professors, students and alumni were honored with multiple awards celebrating their achievements, including this year’s Pyke Johnson award for research on the mobility needs of aging adults. At the same time, recent graduate Jacob Wasserman MURP ‘19 won an award for best capstone of the year.

And UCLA alumna Carole Voulgaris PhD ‘17, an assistant professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design, was recognized with the prestigious TRB Fred Burggraf Award. This award — only given to one researcher a year — was named in honor of the late Fred Burggraf, who served as TRB’s director from 1951 until his retirement in 1964 and provides recognition of excellence in transportation research by researchers 35 years of age or younger.

UCLA ITS is thrilled that our students — both current and former — are making their marks in transportation research. Congratulations to all!