Villanova Team Returns to ITE Traffic Bowl

Villanova Engineering’s Traffic Bowl team: Nathaniel Gallishaw, David Harvey, Andy Ye and Christopher Medora

The Institute of Transportation Engineers chapter at Villanova University recently participated in the 2017 Mid-Colonial Region Traffic Bowl in Baltimore, Maryland. The annual competition, which is a Jeopardy-style tournament with four members per team, took place on April 24. Students respond to prompts such as:

• This class of roads travels for long uninterrupted distances, has limited access, and has the highest speeds.
• At a specific location for an entire year, this is the actual volume of traffic.
• Traffic flow, which is generally expressed in vehicles per hour.
• A road element in which demand exceeds capacity.
• The time, in seconds, for the front bumper of the second of two successive vehicles to reach the starting point of the front bumper of the first
• The geometry of a roundabout reduces or eliminates this type of vehicle-vehicle crash.
• Traffic engineers often use this percentile as a reasonable worst case for a cutoff when decisions are made about speed limits and sight distance criteria.
• A speed used to determine the horizontal and vertical alignments of a highway.

The process of estimating the number of vehicles or people that will use a specific transportation facility in the future

Representing Villanova were Civil Engineering juniors Christopher Medora, Nathaniel Gallishaw, David Harvey and Andy Ye. Four collegiate teams competed with the winner advancing to the national competition in Toronto, Canada on July 31.  

Unfortunately, the Villanova team—the only one comprised of undergraduates—was edged out by Penn State University for the national bid. Team president CJ Medora is already looking forward to next year’s event, hoping to improve and make it to the national level.