April 18, 2008

Transportation summit to focus on partnership-based solutions

The summit will bring federal and state transportation officials together with private sector leaders, transportation experts, scholars and practitioners from the Midwest. They will examine national and regional challenges and opportunities.

The summit, titled Exploring Partnerships for Innovative Transportation and Logistics Solutions, will examine holistic solutions for addressing the issues of traffic congestion, mobility, safety, infrastructure addition, maintenance and renewal by leveraging technology, financing and public-private partnerships. The program will run from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Purdue Memorial Union. It will include a luncheon and awards ceremony at 12:30 p.m.

"The summit will provide an opportunity to showcase the collective expertise of the partner institutions and discuss how to ensure that activities and goals of the new center are synergistic with regional and national needs," said Srinivas Peeta, the center's director and a Purdue professor of civil engineering. "It will provide federal and industrial perspectives of our national transportation challenges; engage the region's state transportation departments in a dialogue about transportation, logistics and economic development; and identify research priorities for the center through a three-way dialogue among government, industry and academia."

Speakers will include Paul Brubaker, administrator of the U.S. Department of Transportation's Research and Innovative Technology Administration; Karl Browning, Indiana's commissioner of transportation; and C. Michael Walton, immediate past chairman of the American Road and Transportation Builders Association. Victor Lechtenberg, Purdue's  vice provost of engagement, will be the luncheon speaker.

Students from Crawfordsville High School, Purdue's undergraduate engineering program and NEXTRANS Center will showcase various transportation-related projects through poster presentations. The networking hour will feature display booths by NEXTRANS institutional partners and summit sponsors.

The $13 million center was announced in November 2006 to improve transportation efficiency and safety, better coordinate "intermodal" commercial freight shipping to strengthen the regional economy, and upgrade the highways and infrastructure of the future.

NEXTRANS is led by Purdue University with major partnerships with University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ohio State University. The center's non-university partners include the Indiana Department of Transportation, Illinois Department of Transportation, Ohio Department of Transportation, state Local Technical Assistance Programs, and Ports of Indiana within the public sector. The Central Indiana Corporate Partnership, NAVTEQ, Delphi, Motorola and SemMaterials are among NEXTRANS' private sector partners.

Researchers are working toward applying technologies and developing strategies to alleviate congestion by pursuing short-term goals that strive to use the current infrastructure more efficiently and long-term goals of improving highways and other elements of the transportation infrastructure.

NEXTRANS focuses on integrating three overall areas: mobility, safety and infrastructure renewal, with an emphasis on developing an "intermodal transportation systems," meaning a system that efficiently coordinates the movement of freight and passengers using a combination of highways, rail, airports, waterways and pipelines.

The center, which is administered by Purdue's Discovery Park, is one of 10 university transportation centers in the nation's 10 federal transportation regions. NEXTRANS covers the U.S. Department of Transportation's Region V, which includes Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Writers: Clyde Hughes, (765) 494-2073, jchughes@purdue.edu

Emil Venere, (765) 494-4709, vernere@purdue.edu

Phillip Fiorini, (765) 496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu

Source:  Srinivas Peeta, (765) 496-9729, peeta@purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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