Institute for Transportation

Record 150+ attend annual Iowa DOT event

The 150+ attendees at the 2024 Traffic and Safety Forum have the difficult task of getting the number of road user related fatalities down to zero.

Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) Director Scott Marler, who gave the welcome and introduction at this year’s forum, told the crowd that the number of fatalities as of the day before the event was 298.

“We are committed to literally saving lives,” Marler said, noting that the number means the transportation officials and researchers in the audience still have work to do.

Because that work remains, the theme of this year’s Traffic and Safety Forum focused on new technological tools that the professionals in the audience can bring to their jobs, particularly how they can harness artificial intelligence (AI) programs.

In his keynote speech titled “AI, AI, Oh!,” Beacon’s Jim Anderson aimed to point out the potential opportunities for the use of AI tools in the transportation field but also provided caveats about its possible pitfalls.

Other speakers throughout the day shared AI case studies or uses of AI they’ve employed in their transportation research projects during the past year, including using connected vehicle data for offset optimization and generative AI in transportation.

Institute for Transportation (InTrans) Associate Director Neal Hawkins also discussed a project with the Iowa DOT and Nerdery to create a cloud platform enabled by AI to employ applications for transportation.

“We are grateful to the Iowa DOT for providing this annual forum highlighting important traffic and safety research topics,” Hawkins said. “It’s great for transportation professionals to get the opportunity to learn from each other about the potential uses of AI in improving traffic safety.”

The event also gave a chance to recognize the now-retired Iowa DOT Traffic and Safety Bureau Director Steve Gent. The bureau’s current director Hossein Naraghi presented the award to Gent that recognized his “outstanding leadership and dedication to improving traffic safety in Iowa.”

The Iowa DOT’s Jan Laaser-Webb, Chris Poole, and Willy Sorensen also shared Traffic and Safety updates with the attendees.

The Traffic and Safety Forum is an annual fall event organized and hosted by the Iowa DOT and supported by InTrans at Iowa State University. The purpose of the forum is to enable traffic and safety engineering professionals to learn about new and innovative systems and processes, share individual experiences, and collectively address issues of interest.