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UNLV’s master of traffic
Professor, with his students, applies expertise in math, electrical engineering and robotics to smooth the way from Point A to Point B
Steve Marcus
Pushkin Kachroo, a UNLV professor in electrical and computer engineering, poses at the Regional Transportation Commission’s Freeway and Arterial System Transportation (FAST) center. Kachroo and his students is working with colleagues, students and government agencies on ways of tracking traffic electronically and getting information to drivers to help them avoid accidents and other disruptions. He’s also drawing top talent in his field to UNLV.
Sunday, July 26, 2009 | 2 a.m.
When you notice that car crashes and road construction aren’t tying up Las Vegas Valley traffic for as long as they used to, remember this name: Pushkin Kachroo.
The co-director of UNLV’s Transportation Research Center is considered something of a genius by traffic engineers. The university lucked out when it got him. He came to Las Vegas two years ago from Virginia Tech only because his wife landed a job as a marketing professor at UNLV.
His resume includes degrees, including two doctorates, from top U.S. and Indian universities. He has published eight books and armloads of academic papers.
The stack of academic accolades is impressive, but he is also making a major difference where the rubber, literally, meets the road, experts say.
He is using his deep and varied expertise in robotics, electrical engineering and mathematics to improve traffic flow throughout the valley.
“Transportation has changed dramatically in the last 20 years,” Kachroo explains from his office in UNLV’s new engineering building. “It used to be about planning and infrastructure — roads, freeways, bridges. Now it’s about sensors and lights and active traffic control.”
Kachroo researches feedback control — essentially action, sensing and reaction. He has applied his research to everything from an electronic sense and response feature in cars to his latest work on traffic patterns across a major metropolitan area.
Here’s his type of scenario: If there’s an accident at Flamingo and Paradise roads at 5 p.m. on a normal Tuesday, what happens? How does it affect traffic not just at that intersection, but near the Strip, the airport, the Las Vegas Beltway, Eastern Avenue and Interstate 15? How long does that disruption last?
And what’s the best reaction to make the system work efficiently again? Do you program signals at other intersections and freeway on-ramps to handle an increase in traffic and speed people away from the now-impaired intersection? Do you reroute traffic? Send e-mail and text messages telling commuters to avoid the intersection? Put a message on freeway signs?
This is the future of transportation management.
At UNLV, Kachroo has helped develop an entirely new discipline in engineering: Transportronics, blending transportation research with electrical engineering. And he has attracted talented students and researchers from top international universities — Cal, Harvard, MIT, the Indian Institute of Technology. One of his students, Lillian Ratliff, just won a prestigious National Science Foundation graduate fellowship.
His team, most of whom have been recruited by universities around the globe, are here spending hours poring over sheets of numbers and applying mathematical formulas to how traffic was affected that time a taxi cut off a tourist in a rental car and he swerved into a light pole on Swenson Street.
Kachroo, his Transportation Research Center co-director Ken Peck, and the rest of their team are trying to build the center into a world leader.
They’re churning out thesis and dissertation quality research papers monthly. And administrators are trying to expand the center’s academic offerings by establishing a joint Ph.D. program with the business college so transportation management and traffic engineering students can get more expertise in policy and finance, something necessary for government projects.
Kachroo thinks all of that can be achieved within five years, which would translate into more predictable commutes for all of us for years to come.
The Transportation Research Center team works with the staff of FAST — the apropos acronym for Freeway and Arterial System of Transportation. These are the people and computers that can cut your commute in half or keep you out of a traffic jam on I-15.
At its heart is a traffic control command center that looks like something in an Apollo mission. The front of the room is dominated by a two-story screen showing several live video feeds from a few of the more than 100 traffic cameras on highways and surface streets across the valley.
In this room, traffic technicians and Nevada Highway Patrol dispatchers work side by side to respond to emergencies and manage traffic around any incident that creates congestion.
One example of the benefit of the FAST-UNLV teamwork is the traffic light synchronization along Charleston Boulevard, which makes that street a quicker weekday morning route from Summerlin into town than Summerlin Parkway.
In many if not most cities, when engineers start developing a freeway or synchronize traffic lights, they base their plans on statistics that are often sporadic, short term and frequently outdated, says Brian Hoeft, assistant director of FAST.
But because Las Vegas is a relatively young city, more of its streets are wired with technology whose kinks have been worked out elsewhere.
Kachroo and his UNLV team have access to a mountain of real-time data from FAST — average speed, car volume, frequency and time of accidents — all collected, intersection by intersection, by a network of sensors. The result is a coordinated traffic management system based on real-world conditions.
That data is funneled to the Transportation Research Center — students and faculty with backgrounds in electrical, traffic and mechanical engineering, robotics and mathematics — who synthesize and analyze the data in minute detail to get information that can be used in traffic planning and management.
As traffic builds in the northbound lanes of I-15, a technician at FAST types out a message to drivers — travel time to Flamingo, 5 minutes; to Charleston, 10 minutes; and so on.
The message pops up on electronic traffic signs all along the corridor.
A similar warning pops up in the form of a text message on the cell phone of UNLV Ph.D. candidate Neveen Shlayan.
She’s sitting in Kachroo’s office, and they’re discussing how to apply a formula normally used to detect bugs in software to predict the traffic repercussions of accidents at specific intersections at different times of day.
Her analysis will soon be incorporated into an academic paper and, she hopes, be presented at a conference or two. It could also change the way emergency responders and traffic technicians at FAST deal with accidents at those intersections.
“Everyone is learning in this era of instantaneous information,” Hoeft said. “We love that Pushkin and his team are here. We can get all the data in the world, but we don’t always have the time to analyze it. They spend all their time analyzing and we can concentrate on implementing what we’ve learned.”
Someday, as technology progresses, the system will communicate directly with in-car and cell phone GPS systems to help drivers avoid high congestion areas by changing their routes based on real-time information instead of guesses.
And if he needs to, Kachroo will come up with a way to keep motorists from checking their text messages while driving, too.
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Now, the big question! Can he synchronize the lights so that one doesn't have to stop at every red light on major avenues each morning and afternoon?
"just a small town girl. living in a lonely world. she took the midnight train going anywhere".
haircut. please. haircut.
Exciting stuff! I wish the best for him and his team! I hate hearing stories of people smashed on these roads - I hope this will help accident prevention. Maybe he should add a little human behavoir into the study.
I wish it were different, but UNLV is a third-rate insitution with third-rate student and faculty. It will remains so for decades to come. Good faculty will come, stay for a little while and move on to states were education and intellectual exploration and output are valued.
trumpeter, Third-rate? I looked those guys up on hr.unlv.edu: Peck makes $144,000 and Kachroo makes $116,000. Cha-ching!
I guess I must be blind in one eye and can't see out the other. I see little or no improvement in our traffic signals. When will the signal lights be like in Scottsdale, AZ. You know exactly when you will get your your turn arrow and it is the same through out the city. Unfortunately Phoenix works the same, but different then Scottsdale. Even there the cities can't be consistent through out the county. Maybe these engineers should drive through out the county so they know what the reality is not just a lot of numbers on a computer screen. Of course that's my opinion, I could be wrong.
And you are suggesting that he could not walk out of here and make a lot more money at either a UC school or in the private sector? Come on. Let's hope he doesn't take an economics class and learn what the free market is, and that he's being underpaid.
hahaha, underpaid by the tax payers. since when is a UC school hiring? have you noticed the recession?
do they have a professor that looks at swimming pool safety?
Actually, a quick search of the UC websites shows a lot of open positions for research faculty throughout the state of California.
http://www.eng.uci.edu/employment-dept?d...
Apparently five open positions at UCI in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department.
True, they are hiring few TEACHING faculty, but this guy is a well funded researcher.
Why do people have to be such haters? We have a fantastic professor doing some great research at UNLV that is making every Las Vegan's life better. Yet people would rather trash him, his work, and the university than to be excited that there's great research being done right here in Las Vegas.
Where does the hatred come from? Is it because you didn't get a degree beyond high school? Is it because you don't value education? Is it because you went to UNR?
Education in this State, and in this city in particular, will improve if the community supports it. An educated work force brings prosperity to everyone. We should strive for such laudable goals.
So, community, start supporting and stop hating.
bill, if these guys are fabulous researchers, why would they want a teaching position in UC, especially while CA is broke? I am impressed with kachroo. Who is this Peck guy and what makes him worth $144,000 of tax payer money? The article doesn't say much about what he contributes?
I'm not a hater, just curious.
The UC system knows how to treat its researchers, UNLV isn't too good at it. Generally, these guys are paid less than the value of the contracts they bring it, so the university turns a profit on them, though I don't know specifically about the other guy. (For example, the UC faculty are taking a furlough like the UNLV faculty, but, the UC Regents exempted faculty paid entirely on federal grants, the NSHE did not).
The budget cuts in the UC hit the undergraduate instruction side of the house, not much of the rest. In many ways, UNLV is a better place to be an undergraduate, because you can spend years in the UC system without actually meeting a professor or seeing one in class.
Bill, nothing against the profs, but in my opinion please be honest about the situation: you shouldn't compare the amount of their contracts to their salaries, you should compare the amount of overhead that they bring in to their salaries.
I didn't know that UNLV profs are taking furloughs? Isn't it only the untenured profs and staff taking furloughs? Tenured faculty do not have to take a furlough?
I didn't use the word overhead, I was more generic because I didn't want to have to explain it if you didn't know it. The point is that a researcher with enough grants can always negotiate a job somewhere other than where they are. Also, you are not quite correct in that grants often have money to buy out the faculty member's teaching time, which is not part of overhead, but allows another faculty person to be hired to teach, effectively returning the researcher's salary to the state.
All faculty are taking furloughs. Tenured faculty, as I understand it, can either take a pay cut, or increase their teaching load, to cover the cut.
Why would this professor want to leave UNLV when they just finished a state of the art new engineering building? I guess I just don't understand the concept: every one has to leave UNLV and go into the Cali system. Dear god, please move back to California if you have nothing good to say about Las Vegas...
Thank you to the LV Sun and Stephanie Tavares for publishing an article showing some of the good that comes out of our local university. It's great to read articles like this, which show UNLV trying to help the local community.
I hope he stays too. I'm reacting to the negativity that says UNLV pays too much and does no good. We have to understand that there are good people at UNLV who have other options if we insult them either financially or verbally. Building UNLV is critical if we ever want to diversify the local economy.
in my opinion, they do PAY TOO MUCH. If people have the opinion that they are overpaid and they consider it an insult, so be it. Tax payers have the right to their opinions. You still haven't explained what makes someone worth $144,000/year?
What makes someone worth $144K? The free market.
Advertise for a just-out-of-school engineering professor, and no one will apply if the salary isn't six figures, much less an experienced person.
What if this person is bringing in $1 million a year in grant money? Not worth it to pay $144K to get $1,000,000?
How about if he really figures out how to improve traffic flows? Not worth 7 cents a year per person who lives in Vegas to do that?
How about Vegas isn't a one horse town dependent on tourists anymore? Not going to happen until UNLV is able to hold up its end. And that's not going to happen with $40,000 a year engineering professors!
heyyoucharlie, yes, it is nice to read good things about unlv in the paper. my opinion that they are overpaid is when I no one tells me what these guys do and I don't have a good imagination to guess. the article here about kachroo is nice because I have insight into what at least one prof over there is doing and it makes me happier about public support of unlv. I still wonder what the peck guy does to earn that hefty paycheck.
So that Peck guy brings in $1,000,000/year? Impressive. Is this true, or you are just saying in theory?
"are good people at UNLV who have other options if we insult them either financially or verbally. Building UNLV is critical if we ever want to diversify the local economy."
1) They should leave. I will insult them now if they need the encouragement.
2) UNLV is a drag on our economy and will continue to do so. It has consume tax dollars directly in the hundreds of millions. It sits on prime real estate that once was worth billions of dollars. Therefore it impacts both the city and county's property tax collections.
3) We really do not need to have taxes go to pay "professors" (they do not teach) to generate gargabe do-nothing research that does nothing for the Nevada or for the country.
4) There is all this talent sitting and wasting away in universities and colleges across the country. If we kicked out half of the "professors" out of the higher ed system and made them actually work for a living then it would be a big shot in the arm of America in the form of productivity.
Good luck, Pushkin.
Remember!
To thine own self be true
and
No good deed goes unpunished.
These are complex problems - some places in the east professors are like rock stars and super athletes and pull down huge salaries. Alas, that won't happen here. I once lived in Minneapolis and my recollection is that they had a percentage of university graduates which was higher than the high school graduation rate here. You need to view some of these things a bit more universally. Where will it go? Shall see. I agree with the UNLV student comment on here - there is lots of pettiness in these comments - lots of heat and very little light.
I guess I am more interested in results. If Pushkin can fix the miserable traffic light system and continue to improve it give him a bigger salary. Better yet the county should hire him and pay twice what UNLV is paying him. I don't think there is a driver in Las Vegas who would object. Of course that is my opinion, I could be wrong.
Imagine a western movie where the teacher gets off the stagecoach to take a risky job educating the frontier kids. Many people will mock the teacher's education. The teacher will wonder if he or she made the right choice....Things have not really changed that much.
Only, standards of literacy have increased so much that ignorant people have computers, can read online newspapers, and even type some semi-coherent messages from time to time.
Actually several generations ago there were frontier preachers of my ilk who would go into small mid-western towns. In those days there were German descendant free thinkers who were opposed to any kind of religious expression. They would tar and feather the circuit riders. It was a good day when the preacher got out of town unharmed. Why is it that I think that many of these commentators may have descended from those who tarred and feathered the preachers? hmmm - now they would starve and purge the professors!
@lbfromlv
I am pretty sure that the city maintains the official position that the lights are synchronized. That is why at many intersections throughout the valley, you can sit at a red light while the nonexistent cross traffic is allowed to clear, and you can watch the light just a couple hundred feet in front of you turn yellow and then red before you are given the green and allowed to proceed a little way before you again have to wait for nonexistent cross traffic to clear.
Las Vegas has simply the worst system of controlling traffic that I have ever experienced. I maintain the position that whomever came up with the system here is either not very bright or is an incredibly intelligent sadist. Either way the result is the same.
so many people make complaints like 'vegas has the worst system of controlling traffic' and that's all they do, complain, complain, complain.
I for one, many times, not always, but often enough, find the major arterials more reliable than the freeway. Go find out who these people are, who their bosses are, and who the elected officials are who could do something about their poor work and take care of it.
OK, you want a solution, go look at what they do in Scottsdale or Phoenix or Tucson or Chandler or Gilbert or Mesa. They've got this great system where they have sensors under the road, so if there are no cars waiting for a green left turn arrow, the green left turn arrow doesn't activate. If there are no cars waiting to cross a major street, the lights don't change to stop traffic on the major street to clear nonexistent cross traffic.
And that thing they do with the green arrows AFTER the green light, allowing people turning left to go through the intersection if there is no oncoming traffic and allowing them to be more patient because they know they'll get the arrow if they can't get through.
But we must remember that this is Las Vegas. This is the city that couldn't turn off the traffic control lights in Downtown for a street race (even though the drivers found it extremely distracting to see lights changing colors while they're racing) becuase to do so, the city said it would have to turn off all of its traffic lights.
Let's be honest, offering solutions to the traffic problem in Las Vegas that don't include a complete overhaul of this sophomoric system that we have now is about as helpful as beating a dead horse with a stick.
for those professors posting on here, in my opinion, you need to tone down the whining about salary because making over $100k/year at a low ranked university is double of what I would consider generous for your workload.
Scottsdale daily traffic volumes can be found at http://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/Assets/docum...
Las Vegas daily traffic volumes can be found at nevadadot.com.
Scottsdale volumes are about 1/2 to 60 percent of what the Vegas volumes are. That makes a big difference.
Rusty you hit the nail on the head. lvnvlvnv you need to go there to see how efficiently the traffic is handled. Apparently you are talking statistics not reality. I have driven all over this country and we have a terrible traffic light system here. The worst I have encountered in my years of travel.
""Transportation has changed dramatically in the last 20 years," Kachroo explains from his office in UNLV's new engineering building. "It used to be about planning and infrastructure -- roads, freeways, bridges. Now it's about sensors and lights and active traffic control."
isn't this a short-sighted and automobile-centered comment?
when we run out of oil, Kachroo,
whatcha gon do, Kachroo?
I have to post this....
I live in Chandler, please don't use this area as an example. This is the rudest, most arrogant, backwards large metro area I have ever seen. Freeways that should have been widened 20 yrs.ago being worked on for 2 or 3 go-rounds, lights that never change when you are waiting to turn etc. Snowbirds and "entitled" monied people that run lights or drive 10 mph under the limit. AND, they don't sell vehicles here with turn signals (they must be an "option"). Good for him what he makes.At least he is trying to change the system for the better and decided to do it there. You don't have it so bad unless you consider the Charleston Underpass when it rains..... BTW I got 40 yrs. there
I just came back from Mesa and I was amazed at how the traffic flow was on the 101. Much better travel then I experienced in the past. I still prefer driving Scottsdale over Las Vegas streets. At least the signal lights are predictable and consistent. The light system here is neither predicable or consistent. Oh and by the way the Charleston underpass was fixed a few years ago to eliminate the flooding problem. I know every city has its issues, but I have lived in Vegas for 15 years and have not observed any improvement in the Traffic signal system here.
As for someone that works in traffic on a daily basis, I see first hand why people are having traffic problems. On a daily basis, I see how little attention to driving they actually do. Many people talk about the "sensors under the road" they have in some places, or this or that does in other places; however, there are different ways of doing the same job. In the Las Vegas Valley, you tend to see more cameras on either the mast arm, or the luminaire arm that are designed to detect oncoming traffic. For the most part, these systems work fairly reliably.
If people would spend their time concentrating on the roads {instead of talking on their cell phones, putting on makeup, and looking for directions (among other things)} and obeying the speed limit, they would find their commute will be much more seemless. Construction zones are sometimes unavoidable, however traffic radio station frequencies are posted in several areas. Try to avoid them because workers in a traffic construction zone usually don't like being there any more than you do.