About Us

The Center is located at Utah State University (USU) and uses its expertise in natural hazards to research congestion chokepoints, evacuation occurrences, infrastructure renewal, and operations as it relates to multi-modal transportation. The Center is also expanding its expertise into man-made hazards, and utilizing its infrastructure testing and monitorig expertise, creating tools for asset management and decision making processes for maintenance (or replacement) of multi-modal transportation infrastructure. Conversely, the Center is planning to take expertise in the center that has not been focused on hazards (e.g. congestion modeling, transit) and apply that to hazards in the form of evacuation simulations and planning. In this way there will be a two-way flow of research producted information, from hazards research to daily operations and from daily operations research to hazards application.

The core expertise to achieve this vision already exists within the Center, in terms of bridge testing and monitoring research that has been performed by Center colleagues over the past 10 years. Results of this research have already been expounded both nationally, through NSF workshops, ASCE journals, and the annual TRB meeting, and internationally at multiple conferences in Japan and Italy.

The expansion that we anticipate in the Center will be in areas that will expand the current hazards research into areas outside of infrastructure, with congestion modeling and multi-modal applications, in particular transit, being two key growth areas. The congestion modeling, in particular, has great potential in terms of chokepoints in daily potential in terms of chokepoints in dailiy operations and modeling of hazard evaculaiton plans.

With the reserach that has been done, the expertise currently residing within the UTC, and the goal to add two more faculty to the Center in the next four years (the first of which will be a transit specialist), the UTC will be a center of excellence, well known amoungst its peers, in the area of transportation hazards reserach and its application to daily tranportation operations.

The research informaiton gathered through the various research activiities of the Center will be dispersed through education, within the university, and technology transfer at national and local levels through research reports, journal publications, conferences, symposia, seminars and the Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) that is also based at USU.

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