Bridge Crossing Analysis

Summary

Aided project team in deciding which alignment a proposed high capacity transit route should take to cross the Willamette River -- the Hawthorne Bridge or the Tilikum Crossing. This decision was based in part on impacts to travel time reliability: the Hawthorne Bridge experiences bridge lifts from ships passing through the river, while one of the traffic signals on the alignment approaching Tilikum Crossing experiences freight train crossings that periodically last over an hour.

Our team developed a method to estimate the impacts to the transit travel time under several different operating scenarios. My role involved gathering data on train crossings and bridge lifts, highlighting patterns in the data, fitting observed data to distributions, and working with other analysts to predict impacts to transit travel times. This exercise informed the selection of the transit route alignment..

Languages/tools

• R
• Multnomah County Bridge Lift API