The Volpe Innovation Challenge inspires solutions to emerging transportation problems through cross-center collaboration, staff development, leadership, and mentoring. It’s a chance for Volpe staff to develop creative ideas that can lead to real-world results.
The fifth annual Volpe Innovation Challenge took place on December 6 at Volpe’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. DOT’s first Chief Innovation Officer, Chris Gerdes, Ph.D., discussed the importance of innovation, and he will lead the panel of judges that will select the winning team. Gerdes joined Volpe this past October for the Future of Transportation speaker series. The judges include the New England regional directors of DOT’s Operating Administrations – people who might use the innovations.
At Volpe’s first Innovation Challenge in 2012, engineer Alex Epstein brought to light how truck side guards can save the lives of bicyclists and pedestrians. Since then, side guards have been adopted or piloted in New York City, Boston, Cambridge, and San Francisco, and the Volpe team won a national 2016 Federal Laboratory Consortium Excellence in Technology Transfer award.
The winning team in 2012 developed the Safety Hazard Analysis Tool, which makes hazard analysis easier by using top-down system engineering and control systems theory. The winning team from the second innovation challenge, led by Volpe environmental biologist Kristen Lewis, recently released a final report detailing a concept for a system that can help transportation practitioners navigate the many information resources on climate change resiliency.
Crowdsource positioning as a complement to GPS navigation won the day at the third innovation challenge, and last year’s winning team led by Volpe environmental protection specialist Peter Herzig came up with TransportSE: Moving Justice Forward, which proposes to create a new interactive screening tool to visualize interactions between multimodal transportation and social vulnerability.
