EDUCATION | TRANSIT LABORATORY

The Transit Lab has developed and implemented modules and quantitative exercises in several transportation courses. These exercises give the students exposure to research conducted at the transit lab and demonstrates the advantages of utilizing Automatic Passenger Counter (APC) and Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) data for practical applications. The presence of Campus Area Bus Service (CABS) on Ohio State's campus gives students a familiar and observable context for conducting these exercises and understanding the results. Students work with large sets of automatically produced APC and AVL data and get an opportunity to design and collect onboard origin-destination data.

Many related civil engineering transportation undergraduate and graduate level classes which use these data are offered every year. Undergraduate level classes such as Civil and Environmental Engineering Systems Assignment and Transportation Engineering and Analysis Assignment are required undergraduate civil engineering core course.

Students use origin destination matrices and apply some of the developed methods on the APC and AVL data in attempt to find expected passenger travel times according to generated origin destination matrices. Other classes which also use the APC and AVL data are graduate level courses such as Urban Public Transportation Project, Urban Transportation Demand Modeling , and Transportation Management Systems in which students collect actual field data, form applications for econometric modeling, and investigate accuracy of forecasted arrival times as a function of several factors