For the 2006/2007 Annual Project, the UCI ITE Student Chapter decided to participate in an on-going research effort associated with the Institute of Transportation Studies, Irvine. Research at ITS has led to the development of an advanced vehicle tracking and identification technology known as PTC, a real time, distributed vehicle travel history database. Vehicles have small wireless devices that can communicate to road side controllers. A short-range connection is established and a traffic cookie (location + timestamp) is written to the on-board database. Continuous tracking throughout the network generates a complete vehicle travel history. The traffic cookies remain in the database, persistent from trip to trip (thus, Persistent Traffic Cookies, or PTC).

Technical feasibility is being evaluated in the laboratory and in defined field tests. Institutional feasibility involves the acceptance of the technology by the population in general and by the traffic control community. As a first step in assessing potential acceptance, a survey was been designed and a pre-test completed. The current project involves the field implementation and analysis of the revised survey, which queries for information on: respondents and their work commutes, respondent attitudes towards privacy issues, and alternate ways to pay for this system. The student chapter project involves the fielding of the full survey and sunsequent analysis. Results are provided in the presentation slides.

The second project was a Traffic Impact Study for a planned commercial center in Planning Area 6 in the City of Irvine.

2006-2007 Annual Project Results:

1. PTC Presentation
2. TIS Presentation

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