NTC@Maryland Featured in the October 2015 UTC Spotlight Newsletter

The USDOT University Transportation Center (UTC) Program has established itself as a champion for promoting university-based transportation research and technology transfer. Over the past 28 years, the focus of the UTC program on advanced and applied research with real-world relevance has produced numerous products that are being used by a number of end users in the public and private sectors. For instance, since establishment of the National Transportation Center at the University of Maryland (NTC@Maryland, http://ntc.umd.edu) in October 2013, talented researchers and students have produced a national travel demand model that agencies use to analyze travel patterns beyond state and metropolitan borders, developed performance measures on the broader economic impact of transportation investment in more than 300 metropolitan areas, and delivered multimodal sustainable corridor planning tools with socioeconomic impact indicators to state transportation agencies.

A topic less frequently discussed is the role of the UTC Program in integrating basic research, applied research, and technology transfer to solve nationally significant transportation problems. Emerging transportation system priorities, such as disaster resilience of the transportation network and mobile computing technologies for transportation sustainability, are critical issues across the Nation that require multimillion dollars of investments in related basic research. However, it is not practical for any UTC to invest its entire annual budget on a single, basic research project. The question worth asking is – How can the UTC Program play a meaningful role in addressing nationally significant transportation research topics that require basic research?

This Spotlight highlights one approach for integrating and streamlining basic research, applied research, and
technology transfer within a UTC setting with two recent success stories at the NTC@Maryland.

For the complete PDF version of the newsletter, click here

Published October 12, 2015