ITRE Internship Complete
Today was my final day working at the Institute for Transportation Research and Education. I started the summer working on a project that looked at new pavement marking retroreflective technology. We looked at the effect of these in nighttime rainy conditions. The beginning of the summer had some potential rainy nights that had me driving to our test sites at 8pm, but as the summer continued, the rain decreased.
To supplement my time on this project, I came on board a project examining access management techniques across North Carolina, and how they affected businesses. We specifically looked at median constructions, when a 5-lane road with a two-way left turn lane was removed and a 4-lane road with a median was constructed. An eleven question survey was designed for businesses to give their opinions about the median and respond with how the median affected customer flow. We visited sites in Wilmington, Raleigh, Salisbury, and Charlotte. Each had unique characteristics, including one in Charlotte which had a light rail line as part of its median. We had an excellent response rate, over 70% for most sites, and we attributed it to our study’s face-to-face interviews. Previous studies in other states achieved less than 20% but had only mailed out surveys.
Both of these projects are still ongoing, and it is difficult to leave them when they are both still near the beginning. Tomorrow though, I leave for Atlanta to begin graduate school at Georgia Tech.