Photo by Nicole Guo, November 5, 2016.

Ten USC transportation students and alumni attended an industry seminar held by ICTPA-SCC, the International Chinese Transportation Professional Association Southern California Chapter, at Cal Poly Pomona on Saturday, November 5. The seminar was cohosted by the Cal Poly Pomona Institute of Transportation Engineers student chapter. Featured were four practitioners from the public and private sectors who presented on the shared themes of travel forecasting and transportation planning with Big Data.

Robert Farley, a Transportation Planning Manager for Metro, shared the ways his team uses large travel forecasting databases to forecast future traffic flows, modal shares, and trip distributions in LA County for the purpose of transit and first-mile/last-mile planning. He highlighted the difficulty of acquiring and applying useful amounts of data through current data collection methods while preserving individual privacy. Farley expressed hope that current cutting-edge developments in technology and data collection methodology could help improve the precision and predictive power of travel datasets.

Luke Cheng, Asia Regional Director of Citilabs, followed with a showcase presentation on Citilabs’ numerous trip modelling softwares including Cube and Sugar. He demonstrated the systems’ interoperability with ESRI GIS databases and their vivid scenario simulations.

Dr. Xudong Jia, Professor and Chair of the Cal Poly Pomona Civil Engineering Department and faculty advisor of the CPP ITE chapter, shared findings from his research using Metro RIITS loop data to analyze the impact of peak-hour freeway traffic rerouting at the time of the West LA I-405 segment closure. In the past Dr. Jia has also collaborated with Genevieve Giuliano, METRANS Director, on extensive research using this same dataset.

Lastly Dr. Jinghua Xu, Project Manager at Fehr & Peers, took the podium to exhibit the firm’s new travel demand forecasting platform ASAP. The software offers clients access to diverse datasets that Fehr & Peers has curated and refined to improve accuracy. ASAP recalibrates origin and destination data from drivers’ cell phones, for example, to connect disjointed paths due to congestion idling.

Photo by Nicole Guo, November 5, 2016.

The four speakers also participated in a panel discussion on anticipating the future needs and constraints of big data in the transportation world. Robert Farley voiced his concerns about using data from “yesterday and today” to predict demand strains that may only manifest in the future. The speakers emphasized that Big Data practitioners should pay close attention to technological developments in data collection methods to hone the accuracy of their models.

The USC students in the audience remarked that they felt the presentations and subsequent panel engaged technical aspects of Big Data that they were encountering in their own course studies. A few said they had even learned how to use Cube while at USC and were looking forward to the more advanced functionality of the updates showcased in Luke Cheng’s presentation. USC and CSULB students were invited to attend future ICTPA seminars, all generally held around greater Los Angeles.

Students Gather with Presenters for a Group Photo

Taken by Nicole Guo, November 5, 2016.

Griffin Kantz

Kantz is a fourth-year undergraduate studying sustainable planning in the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. He can be reached at [email protected].