Bike-lane traffic impact assessment activity for high school students (work in progress)

Abstract

High school students use the surface transportation system virtually every day and can relate to traffic congestion, travel delays, and roadway safety. Moreover, trends observed in the Federal Highway Administration driver's license data and in the National Household Travel Survey data suggest that the popularity of active modes of transportation, such as cycling, is continuously increasing among the high school age group. In this paper, an activity is proposed to show how mathematical models can be used to assess the impact on traffic congestion of retrofitting a roadway with bike lanes. This paper builds upon the familiarity of students with the transportation system and pursues three objectives. First, students learn how math and physics principles can be used to model complex systems, such as a surface transportation system. Second, students are introduced to the decision-making process and before-and-after studies in which quantitative measures are used to support a decision. Third, students learn how engineers can potentially influence city planning and affect communities. In the first steps, students learn how math can be used to model driver behavior and to develop car-following models. Then, students use traffic simulation software to model the flow on an urban corridor. The software considers traffic volume, speed limits, traffic signal timing, and the number of travel lanes to estimate performance measures such as the length of queues, travel delays, and CO2 emissions. In the next step, students modify the simulation model and remove a travel lane to provide the space necessary for a bike lane and a buffer lane. Students discuss the traffic simulation model's outputs and make a recommendation about whether to install a bike lane on the roadway. VISSIM traffic simulation software, a commercial software often used by engineering firms and public agencies to model transportation networks, was used in this activity. A classroom license for the software is available to educators at no charge. Twenty high school students in grades 9 through 12 participated during a one-week engineering summer camp at Saint Louis University. The activity was completed in two hours. Students worked in pairs, with one faculty member and two counselors facilitating the discussion and hands-on computer simulation. As a work in progress, this paper presents the author's primary observations about students' learning and discusses future directions for this research. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2017.