Episode 12.3: Making transportation safer and smarter 

Kevin: And so your listeners, I think, will understand this concept, particularly if they have a child that's an elementary schooler or middle schooler or high schooler, if they live near a school, if they travel during the morning drop off and afternoon pickup, which is of course twice a day, 180 days a year, they realize there's a lot of activity near a school. And there are almost 50 million students that are enrolled in K-12 schools in the United States. And about half of them, 25 million, ride on a school bus.

Leigh: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Vandal Theory, a podcast about science and research at University of Idaho. My name is Leigh Cooper and I will be your host for the day. I'm a science writer and editor here at University of Idaho, and I am joined by my co-host, Danae.

Danae: Hi, Leigh. I'm Danae Lenz, the external communications coordinator at U of I.

Leigh: So today we're actually talking about transportation. And to get us thinking along this line, Danae, how did you get to school as a kid?

Danae: So throughout elementary school and middle school, my parents drove me. I went to a school that did not have a bus system, so I got to be in the car with my parents every morning. But by the time I got to high school, I did take the bus for about two, two and a half years. And that was always an experience.

Leigh: The only time I ever took a bus was actually at my youngest, like pre-K. We lived in Panama and there was a bus to the little school. Otherwise, my mom would drop me and my sister off for elementary and middle school. And in high school, I had my driver's license and drove myself because I had too many extracurricular things to have my parents drop me off anymore.

Danae: I love when this podcast lets me get to know you a little bit more. I had no idea you lived in Panama.

Leigh: I did, military kid. So every morning school buses stop traffic and parents circle the school drop off line. And there are engineering experts who specialize in this moving people and products safely, efficiently, reliably, and sustainably along our roadways, including during the morning and afternoon chaos of school drop off. Today, we're taking a closer look at how we get from place to place with Kevin Chang, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the National Institute for Advanced Transportation Technology at University of Idaho. We'll even take a look at whether Idaho bicyclists can roll through stop signs. Ready to get going?

Danae: I'm ready to take a ride.

Leigh: Well, Kevin, thank you so much for coming on The Vandal Theory today.

Kevin: Thank you, Leigh. It's a pleasure to be here.

Leigh: Well, I'm really excited to dive in. Can you introduce yourself to everyone?

Kevin: I would love to. Yeah. I really appreciate this opportunity to share some time with you. So very briefly, I am a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering here at the University of Idaho. My focus area is in transportation engineering. I also have an administrator hat. I am the director of NIATT, and I'm going to throw a lot of acronyms your way here in the next couple of minutes. NIATT stands for the National Institute for Advanced Transportation Technology. It's a transportation research center that was established by the USDOT as part of the University Transportation Centers program over 30 years ago. So we've been on campus for a long time. I am also the faculty advisor for two student clubs, the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Institute of Transportation Engineers. And lastly, I am the campus representative for the American Society for Engineering Education. Before I came to the University of Idaho in 2013, I was a practitioner, started with the Washington State Department of Transportation, and then spent the majority of my career with the King County Department of Transportation in Seattle where I supervised our pedestrian safety and school safety programs. And then my last stint, I managed our traffic management center.

Leigh: Well, I hope your dean has gotten you a very large hat rack for all the things you do on campus. So we're going to focus probably on one hat for the majority of this, and that's the fact that you help teach transportation engineering. I drive to school every day. Many of us drive every day or are transported in a vehicle or use our roads in some capacity or another. And I would guess we put very little thought into those systems as we travel along them. What is a transportation engineer? What do you do?

Kevin: That's a common question that is asked, and the short answer is it depends on which lens you look through. I think at a very high level, when it comes to transportation engineering and what a transportation engineer does, our job is focusing on moving people and moving products, moving goods, and we need to do so in a safe, reliable, efficient, sustainable manner. So we have to keep all those in mind. From a job responsibility standpoint, roles and responsibilities, I think you can break it up into a number of different buckets. And this includes, I think from a big picture standpoint, transportation safety. So that would include folks that design roads and analyze crashes and look at emerging vehicles and roadway technologies. There are folks that are more on the transportation operations side of things, and this includes intelligent transportation systems, traffic flow, how we control our signals, how do we adapt to changes with incident management? So when there's a crash on the roadway, how are we addressing that crash in a very safe manner? It includes the infrastructure side. So my colleagues that work in the pavement engineering disciplines, in structural engineering, there's a lot of bridges that are part of our transportation network, material's deterioration aspects, the maintenance side of things that falls under that broad bucket. And then very quickly, there's others, and I hate to leave something out, but transportation engineering is broad. The transportation planning side of things are folks that look at travel demand and mode choice and accessibility, folks that are exclusive to the goods movement side of things:freight, logistics, supply chain transportation. Here in Moscow, we have a free transit system, SMART transit, and I have colleagues that study public transportation, multimodal systems. So their areas of interest look at transit. They look at pedestrian travel and bicycle travel. And then last but not least, there's a lot of technology that's involved. So emerging transportation includes things like energy, emissions, autonomous and connected vehicles. So it's all of the above when it comes to transportation engineering, and it's an important part, of course, of our society.

Leigh: So you talk a little bit about some of the things that maybe are shifting, obviously, all the new autonomous vehicles and whether you can call for one, a taxi cab that doesn't have a driver and all that kind of good stuff. Is that some of the emerging things that are happening? How are things changing?

Kevin: Yeah, it's rapid. I think we're getting to a point where that is becoming more and more of a reality. The technology is going to help us, it's going to support us. It's going to give increased mobility for folks that are visually impaired or the elderly. Imagine if they can ride in a vehicle where they don't have to drive, that will open up the door to a lot of exciting possibilities.

Leigh: I have a number of friends who are caretakers of elderly and I know they would love that.

Kevin: Absolutely. Yeah. So very exciting times.

Leigh: So let's dive into one topic for today. You've worked with transportation involving schools around our education systems, specifically K-12 transportation. Before we dive into your team's work, help me understand the scale of school transportation in, whether it's America or Idaho, give me some idea of what this means.

Kevin: Yeah. So this is an area that I think truly is a legacy interest from when I worked for King County, and that's looking at everything from how students travel the school to how we can make our school transportation system safer and more efficient. And so your listeners, I think, will understand this concept, particularly if they have a child that's an elementary schooler or middle school or a high schooler, if they live near a school, if they travel during the morning drop-off and afternoon pickup, which is of course twice a day, 180 days a year, they realize there's a lot of activity near a school. And there are almost 50 million students that are enrolled in K-12 schools in the United States, and about half of them, 25 million, ride on a school bus. And so it's a fleet of nearly half a million school buses.

Leigh: I don't know why that surprises me, but it does.

Kevin: Particularly in our rural communities where parents rely on that yellow school bus to get their son or daughter to school. School buses themselves are very, very safe. One of the most safest types of transportation that are available. Less than 1% of traffic fatalities involve children on school transportation vehicles, but that number is a non-zero number. There are incidences, students walking to and from school, getting on and off of school buses. And so it's something that we need to pay attention to. I don't want to mislead your listeners. It's a concern, but it's not something that causes a lot of tragedy in our communities. I think what is important to mention is that a lot of times the near misses are incidences that we have to be concerned about. Illegal passes of school buses when that bus is stopped and the stop arm is deployed. I work with an agency that collects data once a year. Over 40 million illegal passes occur throughout the United States. Cars, drivers that are maybe not sure of what they need to do or simply are disregarding that big yellow box that has lights and signs deployed. So that's a concern that we certainly have.

Leigh: So for any of our listeners listening to this while driving, excellent reminder.

Kevin: Yes, absolutely. A PSA to all of your listeners.

Leigh: So tell me, what are some of the things that you've looked into around school transportation?

Kevin: Yeah, a couple studies come to mind. One of them started when I first joined the University of Idaho. I partnered with a company, a seatbelt manufacturer, to look at the use of seat belts on school buses. And the highlight of that study was I had a chance to go to Southern Indiana, to watch them run an in-person demo of a school bus crashing into a wall at 35 miles per hour.

Leigh: That would've been very exciting.

Kevin: Yes, it was exciting and it was very loud when it occurred.

Leigh: I imagine.

Kevin: Yes. And in a nutshell, the concern is that when school children are riding a yellow school bus at relatively low speeds, the big foam pads that encapsulate the seat, which is described as compartmentalization, provide a level of safety for kids. But when they're riding on a school bus where they're traveling at highway speeds, it becomes a larger concern. And so an evolving area of study is the question as to whether or not seat belts should be required on school buses. And as of today, there are about eight or nine states that now require seat belts on all yellow school buses, but it also lends itself to some trade-offs that usually the driver or a teacher would be responsible for. And that's the reason why they're not widely adopted. Compliance issues. Is the driver going to be responsible for checking that each student is properly buckled? Are there legal ramifications for the school or the school district? And so it's an ongoing discussion. We probably don't have enough time to cover all the nuances, but that was certainly an interesting study that I was part of. And then if I may, another one closer to home, and I love studies that include our local partners, involved the Moscow School District and the schools here in town. We were very interested in how school children get to and from school. And traditionally, that data is collected using a paper survey. And so for our study, we actually used drones, unmanned aerial systems, and flew them up into the sky at each of the elementary schools to see if we could collect the same kind of data.

Leigh: How accurate was it compared to the paper surveys?

Kevin: It was an interesting study. What we found was that the method of using drones was okay in specific cases. So capturing the students who either rode the bus or a bicycle, we could use the video to clearly identify that number, and that number matched the paper survey. It was a little bit less clear when it came to the children that walked to school or were picked up by a parent or guardian. And this again is the exciting thing about research studies is we learn as we go. So we found that the drone could only capture a certain geographic area. And so if a child left the campus and then was picked up by mom or dad a couple blocks away...

Leigh: Well, parents are embarrassing.

Kevin: They can be. They can be.

Leigh: We can't be dropped off right in front of the school.

Kevin: Absolutely. And so for those kinds of scenarios, the drone would not have been able to pick up the fact that the child was getting a ride in a car. And so we learned things like that. We also had issues with tree canopy coverage, for example. When the drone is 100 feet up in the air, any behavior that occurs below the trees is not visible to us.

Leigh: Sure.

Kevin: Around here, of course, we've got wonderful green foliage most of the year, and so that was something that we had to contend with. And then we were also very sensitive about privacy concerns, flying the drone high enough in the air where we were not capturing too many specific identifiers of each child. Processing the data was a challenge. Finding the different nuances was a learning experience. And then I should mention getting all the approvals from the University of Idaho as well as the Moscow School District was a fairly significant undertaking at the time.

Leigh: Of course, on the flip side, the paper surveys, I would guess, are relatively expensive to run, or I mean, what's the impetus of switching to drone?

Kevin: The purpose of using the drones was to limit the impact during the classroom time. So the teachers wouldn't have to distribute them. We wouldn't have to rely on the children to provide the responses.

Leigh: Backpacks are black holes.

Kevin: That is correct. But we also recognize that there were trade-offs to both forms.

Leigh: It's the learning process.

Kevin: That's what research is all about.

Leigh: All right. So let's dive into another area of sort of specialty for yourself. You've worked to look at bicycle safety and how bicycles move people around. What specifically have you done in the world of bicycles?

Kevin: Yeah. When it comes to the non-motorized modes of transportation, we recognize that pedestrians and bicycles are an important part of our transportation community. And I will admit, I am not an avid bicyclist, but Moscow, Idaho is in fact in the top 1% of all United States communities in terms of the percentage of people that commute by bicycles. The work that I did is very relatable to the folks here in town.

Leigh: That's very cool. I did not know that.

Kevin: It was also an opportunity for me to work with some longtime colleagues and friends in the area who were at partner institutions in the Pacific Northwest conveniently in both Washington State and Oregon. And so a little bit of background about our study was that we looked at what's called the Idaho Stop.

Leigh: Okay.

Kevin: And I love this platform because again, it's an opportunity to educate your listeners who may not be familiar, may have been a while since they've passed their driver's license exam. So Idaho passed its bicycle, and this is in quotations, sort of "stop as yield" legislation in the early 1980s. And what that means is the law allows bicyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs when it is safe to proceed, and it requires them to stop at red lights and then go when conditions allow them to do so. So by law, if they see a stop sign, they don't have to come to a complete stop. They can slow down a little bit, look both ways, see no traffic, and then continue through the intersection. And that of course allows them to preserve their momentum, which inherently is kind of a safety benefit to them. And so we looked at this, we had this study because Idaho passed this law in the 1980s. Our sister states, Oregon, passed the law in January of 2020, so nearly 30 years later. And Washington's law took effect in late 2020 as well. And so we were curious. All right, a new law is in place. We've got these states that are adjacent to each other. What does the general public know about these laws and what are their general perceptions of them?

Leigh: So what did you find? I'm very interested because I do ride a bicycle semi-often, and I don't think I knew that law.

Kevin: So this is really the fun part of my job is to creatively craft a scope and produce meaningful work in this research area. If I can toot our horn a little bit, we received the best paper award from the Transportation Research Board for the work that we did. So big picture was we looked at different groups and how they perceived these bicycle rolling stop laws, BRS laws. And we recognize that a law can change the legal requirement, but if road users, not including you, Leigh, but if road users don't understand the change, then it can create quite a bit of confusion. And so we conducted interviews, we ran a survey, and then we also, our partners at Oregon State conducted a driver simulator study on this. And very briefly, what we found was that people may know that bicyclists roll through stop signs, but that doesn't necessarily mean they understand when it's legally permitted. This creates an important distinction between illegal behavior and legal rolling stops. And the big takeaway I think for me was the gap between what the law actually allows and what people think it allows. If drivers or cyclists, if they don't know the rules, then even legal behavior can be perceived as unsafe. And so our study, our survey, found that cyclists and the general public don't necessarily see the laws the same way. Bicyclists, not surprising, had generally more positive perceptions of these rolling stop laws. The broader public, mostly drivers, had a more muted response.

Leigh: That is not shocking. No, because I've done the come screeching to a halt and almost flip over the handlebars thing because you're like, "Oh my gosh, I need to stop." And I mean, that obviously would end poorly for me.

Kevin: So in Moscow, feel free to just slow down. Don't come to a complete stop. And if it's safe for you to do so, please proceed through the intersection.

Leigh: Okay. And I want to make sure so that our listeners are clear, that's for stop signs. Is it for red lights or that's treat a red light like a red light?

Kevin: So for red lights in Idaho, they should come to a stop and then proceed when it's safe to do so. The law is different in our sister states.

Leigh: Okay. All right. Let's change topics real quick. Not only do you do research, but you are also a teacher and in fact were awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award for University of Idaho in 2023. What are some of the tips and tricks and ways that you structure your classes that really help the students engage with engineering, which is undoubtedly a very, very difficult subject to master?

Kevin: I have to begin by saying very humbled to receive the award. There are so many people here who are dedicated to this craft and who are truly passionate about helping students to learn and to grow. I think good teaching strengthens our university's mission, strengthens our university's research capabilities by allowing students to learn and how their knowledge is created and applied. And my goal as an instructor is to bring that mindset into the classroom, and it's challenging at times, depending on the topic. Sometimes it's not the most exciting. So for me, it's employing a very diverse set of classroom activities. It is not going to be PowerPoint for 50 minutes straight or 75 minutes straight. I think if we could cycle back to when we were a student, we would recognize that that's not the medium that we would prefer as well.

Leigh: I would agree with that. It was hard.

Kevin: So it's a mix of presentation styles. I do like to use a little bit of PowerPoint. I like to do chalkboard or whiteboard examples. I enjoy giving exercises where students can work in smaller groups in the classroom where we can discuss, learn from our mistakes and proceed in a meaningful manner. And then there's other tools that I have tried as an educator. One that actually generated a research paper was allowing students to self-grade their homework as a means of helping them to learn where they may have made a mistake. Now, given the advent of technology, and again, this is probably a separate podcast in and of itself, students have a lot of accessibility now to homework problems and I think the homework solutions in particular. And if they are simply copying and pasting an online solution, no one is winning this process. So even my study on homework self-grading has evolved because now all students have access to the solutions for free. And so thinking about how they can learn, how they can complete their homework and really benefit from that exercise on their own is becoming a much more challenging enterprise. I also teach our first year engineering course and we are exploring how AI is integrated into the classroom. So we're doing a lot of different things, thinking about how that can be a beneficial tool for students.

Leigh: Is there one example where you saw learning click for a student?

Kevin: Yeah, I think if I can use that AI example, I think it's helping students understand, given the technology that's available, how they can use it to truly benefit them. And it's an understanding, at least at this somewhat early stage, that they need to trust but verify the tools that are available to them. To simply rely on ChatGPT entirely to complete an assignment is going to be of no help to them.

Leigh: Not in the long run. You're not going to understand how to apply any of the things. You might be able to get an answer, but in the real world, you got to know how to apply it.

Kevin: And so as educators, we are starting to see some of that in the assignments that are submitted, where students will submit something where it just doesn't seem like it was entirely their work. So how do we pivot it back to where we're really asking the student to spend all of his or her time doing the work that we are asking them to do on their own?

Leigh: It's a lot of responsibility for them to take ownership of their education in that way.

Kevin: It is a lot of responsibility of the student. And there's also responsibility on the part of the instructor to provide them with the guidance that they need.

Leigh: Well, we're kind of coming up on the end here. Any last thoughts you want to leave with the audience? Take home messages?

Kevin: Yeah, I think in general, when it comes to transportation engineering, the research work that we do, it truly does take a village. Colleagues within my department, within our college, this wonderful University of Idaho. I also always like to give a shout out on some of our larger projects where we do work with other institutions. And then I think if there's a closing remark that I can leave for your listeners, it's that when it comes to our evolving transportation system, there truly are no boundaries. And so by working together, we can make a meaningful difference to move people and goods safely, efficiently, and in a sustainable manner.

Leigh: Well, I look forward to having you back on the podcast once we all get our Jetson cars, so.

Kevin: Excellent. Thank you again for the invitation.

Leigh: No problem. Thanks for coming. All right, Danae, how was that?

Danae: This episode was really fun. So basically every episode of this podcast, I learn something new, but it's really fun when one of us learns something that is actually applicable to our lives. So it was a lot of fun hearing you be like, "Wait, what? I don't have to stop at stop signs when I'm on a bicycle?" Like, I just had to giggle at that.

Leigh: I mean, I'm not saying I was stopping at stop signs, but now I can do it without guilt. It's always super fun to be able to learn something that I can use every day. For me, it was so fun to just listen and think about there's so many things that day-to-day, you just kind of go through life and you don't think about what it took to make the scene in front of you. School drop off, that's moving so many people through a small dense space in a very short period of time. And it never occurred to me that that was a problem that engineers looked at, that that was an engineering problem to work through. I just love it when I learn something and it shows like where the science came in to solving day-to-day problems.

Danae: Yeah, I agree. I also was intrigued by the part where he was talking about seatbelt usage on school buses, because as we discussed before, I did take the bus for a couple years, and I can tell you, as far as I recall, my school bus did have seat belts on it, and I never once put that seatbelt on. And you know what? No one around me did either, because I was the kind of kid I just didn't really want to stand out. So if everyone else was using their seatbelt, I would have, but no one else was, so I didn't. And I do think, like, obviously it makes sense in some regard to pass laws to make it required for kids to wear seatbelts because seat belts are awesome. They save lives, but it would be really hard to comply when you've got 30, 40 kids on a bus telling all them to keep their seatbelts on.

Leigh: It would be an incredibly high bar, possibly an impossible bar to get over, because even if like the driver took the time to get up, walk back, check everybody's seat belts, the moment they sit down, you know there's some kid who's just going to unbuckle it just because, because they want them to be buckled, they will not be buckled because kids, you know, that's just the way that rolls.

Danae: I mean, now I need to know, Leigh, were you the kid that would have unbuckled your seatbelt?

Leigh: You know, in all aspects of my life, I am a rule follower despite the fact that I just told you that I was going through stop signs, apparently legally, but in my mind, illegally. This is one small case where I, for some reason, got it in my head that it was cool to unbuckle my seatbelt when I was like nine. So I had a phase of like a year where I kept trying to unbuckle my seatbelt and getting in trouble. Apparently this is my rebel era podcast.

Danae: I love this so much. I've learned so much about you.

Leigh: All right, everyone. Thank you for listening to The Vandal Theory. Be sure to rate, review and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform to help others discover conversations about science, research and innovation at University of Idaho. Email us with research topics, questions or issues you'd like to discuss in a future episode at vandaltheory@uidaho.edu. To learn more about research at U of I and listen to past episodes of The Vandal Theory, visit go.uidaho.edu/vandaltheory. My name is Leigh Cooper.

Danae: And I'm Danae Lenz.

Leigh: Thank you for listening.