REU Site: Safe and Sustainable Transportation: Rural Matters

Montana State University, Bozeman MT

Investigators

Abstract

Intellectual Merit The three year REU site will seek to develop integrated solutions to the safety, sustainability, and mobility challenges confronting the country's rural transportation network. These challenges cannot be addressed simply using conventional engineering solutions; they require researchers to cut across traditional boundaries between science, engineering, and the humanities to both fully understand the challenges and to holistically work toward their solution. The fabric of the nation's rural communities is woven together by its transportation network. Like the rest of the country, rural communities have and continue to evolve economically and socially, and the transportation system that serves them needs to correspondingly evolve. Among the many challenges confronting rural areas are: 1) a rapidly increasing population and expanding exurban development, 2) an aging and deficient infrastructure and 3) a landscape heavily impacted by human activity. In response to these multifaceted challenges, students at the Safe and Sustainable Rural Transportation REU site will research sustainable transportation infrastructure materials and practices, safety and human factors, and mobility. Broader Impacts This REU site program will address the nation's need for a diverse group of innovative transportation researchers and professionals capable of pursuing interdisciplinary and creative long-term solutions to the increasingly complex challenges confronting the rural transportation system. Using real transportation problems confronting rural America as a medium, the program will improve undergraduates' understanding of the depth and breadth of most contemporary research questions; foster their ability to identify and draw important connections between the diverse disciplines needed on a research team; and enhance their basic analytical, research and communication skills. Further, the REU site will broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in science and engineering research, with a focus on women and Native Americans students, by working with various diversity programs and in direct partnership with tribal colleges in the recruitment of participants.