Dr. Anuj Sharma is an associate professor in the Civil Construction and Environmental Engineering Department at Iowa State University. He is the co-director of REACTOR (Realtime Analytics of Transportation Data) lab. In these positions, he teaches transportation engineering courses to undergraduate and graduate civil engineering students, conducts research in the transportation operations area, and participates in numerous professional organizations. He is also Editor in chief of Springer-Nature’s Journal of Big Data Analytics in Transportation.
His research uses big data-driven discoveries to help make better short term (usually automated control) and long term (policy) decisions. The High-Performance Cluster (HPC) assembled for the REACTOR lab is able to ingest multiple streams of real-time data from multiple sources. REACTOR-HPC and a memorandum of understanding with Iowa DOT, has placed Iowa State University among one of the very few facilities in the US transportation arena using big data analytics in the field of transportation.
Since ATPIO was formed in 2004, it has maintained focus on its strategic objective to facilitate bilateral collaborative activities and partnerships that include research, as well as knowledge and technology transfer between diverse groups of transportation professionals in US and India. I am pleased to report that in 2018 ATPIO members, distinguished academics, as well as highly respected transportation professionals from public and private sectors, continued their collaborative efforts with their counterparts in India.
2018 ATPIO Annual Meeting
Consistent with its decade-long tradition, ATPIO held its 2018 Annual Meeting in conjunction with the TRB Annual Meeting. Logistically this works out well since many transportation professionals of Indian origin gather at this meeting. Our ATPIO Annual Meeting was well attended and provided a good networking opportunity for academics, professional practitioners and students. Especially well-received were presentations on WCTR-2019, COMSNETS2018 and Workshop on ITS, as well as 2017 TRG activities by Professors K V Krishna Rao, Gitakrishnan Ramadurai and Manoranjan Parida of IITs Mumbai, Chennai and Roorkee, respectively. Attending students found reception that followed as a good venue to meet one-on-one with experienced transportation professionals of Indian origin.
New Look of ATPIO Website
During this year, thanks to Professor Mohan Venigalla and graduate students from IA State, UC Irvine and GMU, ATPIO website became vary vibrant. Behind what you see, the website is secure and backed a secure email server as well. The improvements to the site and the email server give us the ability to securely communicate with members and friends as well as automatically track memberships. Having put so much effort into all this, we hope it will help us gain greater momentum for our 2019 activities.
Collaborative Activities
ATPIO continued to actively facilitate collaboration between academia in US and India. ATPIO members participated in organizing conferences held in India. ATPIO is assisting IIT-Mumbai host the 2019 World Conference on Transport Research (WCTR). As in the past, we are co-sponsoring 2019 Conference of Transportation Research Group (TRG) in India. In 2018 ATPIO and TRG continued organizing joint webinars to facilitate more bi-lateral collaboration between transportation professionals in US and India. We intend to arrange two webinars per year on topics of mutual interest, presenters alternating between ATPIO and TRG. ATPIO members have been actively providing assistance to India’s Smart Cities initiative as well. We are working with George Mason University (GMU) to sponsor an open access journal in transportation to be launched by GMU.
ATPIO Webinars
During 2018 ATPIO organized the following two successful webinars:
“Application of big data analytics in transportation operations”,by Professor Anuj Sharma
ATPIO Student Scholarship
Thanks to Professor Jayakrishnan, ATPIO received a generous donation of $1,000.00 from our Gold Sponsor Mr. Venu Sarakki of Sarakki Associates. Previously Professor Shashi Nambisan, former ATPIO President, had donated $200.00 toward student scholarship program. ATPIO greatly appreciates these donations. As a result, ATPIO has awarded a $250.00 travel scholarship to Akhilesh Chepuri of Surat, India, who will present a paper at the 2019 TRB Annual Meeting. Also, ATPIO expects to award five- $100.00 scholarships at the Annual Meeting.
After venturing into space exploration, electric cars, solar cities, and Hyperloop, Elon Musk decided to transform the transportation industry with his next venture “The Boring Company”. It all started with the worsening traffic conditions in Los Angeles, which he describes as, “moving from 7th level of hell to the 8th level of hell”. With high risers scrapping the clouds, a stratified transportation system below ground is his solution to the never-ending traffic congestion. Starting from a conventional tweet from being stuck in traffic, The Boring Company has come a long way in conducting its first test run in Hawthorne, California. The Boring Company intends to develop tunneling machinery, which could be faster and efficient in reducing the tunneling cost. Using this machinery the company aims to create a 3D transportation network below ground to relieve the traffic burden above ground. Given Elon Musk’s past reputation some welcomed his initiative, which could revolutionize the tunnel construction industry. While others considered this was one more of Musk’s amusements and doubted the prospects of the idea.
Multistoried Tunnel Transportation System (Source: Boring Company)
Among the various solutions for congested traffic flow, Musk chooses to bet his money on the underground system. He believes that underground tunnels pose a safer transport system as opposed to flying cars which are guillotine waiting to fall over people’s heads. He backs up his idea with some critical points. The space below the surface is limitless, can be built to any number of layers and equipped with vehicles. It is completely weatherproof and free from street closures and construction hinderance. Hence, he is strongly rooting for his company to develop machinery which can bore holes faster and build tunnels that can help transport people across places at high speeds.
The first video depicting this vision of the boring company is truly fascinating. Taken right out of a sci-fi movie, it presented a picture of a techie world below ground. Cars moving down elevators to skate through at high-speed in tunnels which evolve into a network just like one above ground and the autonomous high-speed pods that pedestrians can hop into at street ends for hassle-free travel. Such a vision set-forth high expectations for the company. When the news broke out that Musk was drilling a test trench in his Space X office at Hawthorne, the tweets weren’t boring anymore.
One year and six months, the test trench has expanded into a 1.14-mile tunnel running 20-40 feet beneath the streets of California. It runs through the neighborhood between 105 freeway and Hawthorne Municipal Airport. It incurred a cost of $10 million excluding the cost of equipment, research, and development. On 20 December 2018, the audience was in for quite a surprise at the opening event of the first test run by the Boring Company. The reviews suggest that the tunnel ride was not as “epic” as its visionary Elon Musk terms it to be. The car elevators were also unveiled which are the size of two standard parking spaces, transporting the car to the mouth of the tunnel where the ride is set to start. The ride was completed by a Tesla Model X equipped with special guide wheels as opposed to the expected “autonomous electric skates”. The guide wheels can be attached to any autonomous electric vehicle and will be hidden (fold inwards) when not in use and will incur a separate cost estimated about 200-300$. The ride itself was neither smooth gliding nor fast as promised. The rough edges of the tunnel resulted in quite the rattle and the car skated across the tunnel touching only 35-55 mph speeds nowhere near the promised 150 mph.
The test run has left the company facing some not-so-boring questions on whether this underground loop transportation system is really the way ahead. Although Musk doesn’t agree the entry and exit points of this system are perceived to encounter severe congestion. The vehicles will queue up at the entry points waiting for their turn to enter the tunnel system. The queue can spillback and aggravate the traffic congestion on roads. A possible solution could be the garage car elevator prototype, another idea from the boring company. This can help cars from their origin point to directly enter the tunnel traffic system and travel straight to their destination. The huge amount of dirt production from all the tunneling needs to be handled. This dirt has been reused into making the boring bricks, which are showcased by the watch tower construction at Space X Hawthorne facility. In the long run, there are other factors such as ground structure and environmental reviews which could pose problems to this project. In a city like Los Angeles, there are many geographic features such as oil wells and earthquake faults, which need to be considered as the company plans to dig deeper for more layers. Environmental reviews are time-consuming and hard processes, which can push the timeline of the project by three to four years. The company could run into legal battles if they do not abide by these reviews like the one in Westside LA which caused them to abandon their project entirely [3].
Watchtower by Boring Bricks (Source: TESLARATI)
There is one fundamental question the Boring Company fails to answer convincingly – conceptually, in what respects the underground system of tunnel transport for passenger cars is radically different from the underground mass rail transit? In terms of passenger capacity, how pale the Boring Company looks in comparison to the underground mass transit? No doubt that the transportation planning community would embrace a transformative idea to avoid urban congestion. However, the planning community is very skeptical about this concept altogether. The idea is appreciated but the prototype is severely criticized for not meeting the expectations set forth. The poor performance of the prototype raises several questions on the plausibility of such an underground 3D transportation network that can ease the burden of traffic above ground. Having said that, the boring company still has four projects up its sleeves to prove its point.
References
A First Look At Elon Musk’s Plan To Beat Traffic By Digging High-Speed Underground Tunnels. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/elon-musk-just-posted-a-concept-video-for-his-new-tunnel.
The Boring Company’s ‘Monty Python’ Watchtower Is Real, and It Looks Great _ Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/article/51827-the-boring-company-s-monty-python-watchtower-is-real-and-it-looks-great.
Lawsuit prompts Musk’s Boring Co. to abandon plans for tunnel. https://www.dailybreeze.com/2018/11/28/sepulveda-tunnel-1st-ld/
I Took a Ride through Elon Musk’s New Tunnel in California – The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148061/boring-tunnel-test-drive-hawthorne-tesla-elon-musk.
This annual symposium is for focused academic idea-exchange among researchers and practitioners on emerging research and applications in transportation. The schedule will include podium presentations, poster sessions as well as innovative idea-exchange sessions. As the symposium follows the Transportation Research Board meeting, researchers traveling to the USA from around the world, and specifically from the Pacific Rim countries may find the symposium a convenient stop for focused academic exchange on selected topics. The intended participants are academics, researchers, graduate students and industry professionals in transportation who stay abreast with the latest research developments in the field. We are particularly interested in new research ideas that may be still under development or involve preliminary results.
ATPIO is pleased to announce that Sarakki Associates has sponsored a supplementary travel-scholarship grant for students. ATPIO would present five of these scholarships at the Annual Meeting to be held at TRB on January 2019. Each scholarship is for $100. The following are the eligibility and selection criteria for the award.
The recipient must be an eligible student member of ATPIO.
The student must be currently registered in, or a recent graduate from a US university and plan to pursue a career in transportation.
The recipient must have a paper accepted for presentation (podium or poster) at 2019 TRB annual meeting
The recipient must be present at the ATPIO annual meeting and register for the scholarship
Selection will be made at the ATPIO annual meeting by random draw
Please begin by registering as a student member by clicking here.
Dr. Anuj Sharma is an associate professor in the Civil Construction and Environmental Engineering Department at Iowa State University. He is the co-director of REACTOR (Realtime Analytics of Transportation Data) lab. In these positions, he teaches transportation engineering courses to undergraduate and graduate civil engineering students, conducts research in the transportation operations area, and participates in numerous professional organizations. He is also Editor in chief of Springer-Nature’s Journal of Big Data Analytics in Transportation.
Since ATPIO was formed in 2004, it has maintained focus on its strategic objective to facilitate bilateral collaborative activities and partnerships that include research, as well as knowledge and technology transfer between diverse groups of transportation professionals in US and India. I am pleased to report that in 2018 ATPIO members, distinguished academics, as well as highly respected transportation professionals from public and private sectors, continued their collaborative efforts with their counterparts in India.
