The Institute of Traffic Engineers, a club at Sacramento State, was recently awarded a grant for its work involving traffic data collection at a local high school.

The institute, a club for students interested in transportation engineering, was awarded a $1,000 grant by The Institute of Traffic Engineers International Board for its participation in The Institute of Traffic Engineers International District Data Collection Project. The board reviewed 22 proposals from various colleges and awarded five grants, including one to Sac State.

“The club took it as a compliment that ITE’s board awarded them the grant over other schools,” said Stephen Nelson, senior civil engineering major and president of the Sac State branch of the traffic engineers group.

Both the Institute of Traffic Engineers’ National and International branches offered grants to student chapters. The club did not receive the national grant because the international district wanted to award it the Data Collect Project award, said Sean de Guzman, the club’s vice president and senior engineering major, in an email.

De Guzman said that he felt a sense of pride when the club was awarded the grant.

“I feel proud to be involved in such a respected professional organization,” he said. “Students who do not hold leadership positions within clubs do not know how much time and effort we take and devote to projects such as these.”

The data collected by the club will be used in the writing of the newest edition of the constantly updated Institute of Traffic Engineers Trip Generation Handbook.

“The Trip Generation Handbook is used by transportation engineers in practice when deciding how large or small to design a facility such as a highway, freeway, or even local street,” De Guzman said.

With the help of computerized counters, teams of volunteers collected parking data at Rio Americano High School in Sacramento during the school’s peak traffic hours.

“We stayed a full 12 hours during the three-day data collection project,” De Guzman said. “We were positioned at strategically planned stations along American River Drive and the North American River Levee … The most difficult part was collecting the data during the morning and afternoon rush of students.”

Volunteers used a combination of handheld and automatic traffic counters to record each car that came and went from the parking lots’ main and secondary driveways. Club members used handheld counters to document exactly how many vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians commuted to campus in 15-minute intervals, De Guzman said.

“We designated what buttons to push for certain actions observed. There was one for entry, another for exit, and a third for bicyclists and pedestrians,” Olsen said.

While manual traffic counters could be used for smaller driveways, another system needed to be devised to tackle roads with larger volumes of cars.

“The other traffic counters we used were automatic vehicle counters,” De Guzman said. “They are the black tubes drivers drive over without even noticing. Whenever a vehicle passes over them, it sends air through the tube and into the counter box relaying the information that a vehicle has just passed over the tube and counts one vehicle.”

A variety of factors were taken into account including building type, location, parking availability, and whether the land was rural, in a city or a suburb, said Kevan Shafizadeh, associate professor of civil engineering and the club’s faculty adviser.

The data collected by the club for the Trip Generation Handbook is important because professional engineers will use it in real-world situations.

“Let’s say a city is expanding and creating a new neighborhood with a school. They can use the data ITE collected to size the access and parking area for the new school,” Olsen said.

Without the Trip Generation Handbook, engineers in charge of these kinds of projects would have to hire a third party group to perform costly data collection studies. Engineers would pay much more for these studies than the $1,000 grant received by the club, Olsen said.

The Institute of Traffic Engineers is like any other club on campus, Nelson said.

The club holds meetings, hosts guest speakers and goes on field trips, Shafizadeh said. He, along with four other student officers, attend the Western Regional Annual Meeting every year.

Nelson said the club plans on using the grant money as a fund for this year’s Western Regional Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

“I am very proud of the work we’ve accomplished over the years, and I do not think Stephen gets enough credit for all of the work he’s put in,” De Guzman said. “He is by far one of the hardest working students I have ever crossed paths with and is going to make a great engineer.”

To find out more about ITE, see Shafizadeh or go on the chapters website at http://www.csus.edu/org/ite.

Robert Linggi can be reached at [email protected].