Team Number: 25
School Name: Bosque School
Area of Science: Modeling
Project Title: Transportation Modeling
What the problem is
Urban traffic is constantly slow and congested in large city as cars crawl along caring one person to a nearby destination. This massive amount of cars creates high pollution levels in cities and creates numerous hassles in navigating around a city. The constant need for maintenance of roads drains public fiscal resources. Also, the car is an uneconomical, high maintenance machine that is damaging the environment through pollution and waste.
What needs to be done
The speed of public transportation has been increasing exponentially recently. Public transportation now appears as a feasible replacement to the automobile, allowing people to navigate around a city quickly.
Why it is important
With decreasing natural resources, increasing pollution, global warming, and high traffic levels; the world needs a new, affordable and feasible public transportation method.
How you plan to work on it
Our goal is to create a public transportation modeler, which allows city designers and public transportation designers to create and run simulations of public transportation systems. The simulation will track peak hours, create all possible paths and most popular paths and more. The model will than see where bottlenecks in the systems appear. The tool will even allow you to create unique maps with multiple systems/tracks, enter system speed (acceleration, deceleration, etc). Also, we plan to monitor and track people’s motion throughout the map, so when the simulation is complete, the user can view the path’s of frustrated individuals and the root of their problem. The user can also set statistics on people and their motion so that the model can more accurately predict and demonstrate the effectiveness of the public transportation system.
To help simplify our model, we will initially focus on the Albuquerque downtown area, along with a long distance rail to the Santa Fe downtown area. Although the program will be designed to support multiple maps, areas, and simulations, we will be focusing on an area that could really benefit from public transportation because of the urban sprawl; we will be able to more accurately judge the successes and applications of the model.
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