About us

Mission

The primary mission of the PyTrans project is to promote the use and adoption of the Python programming language in the field of transportation. We aim to establish and grow a community of students and educators with diverse interests in transportation, and encourage them to participate in our open-source project. We intend to serve as a resource for users who wish to see how the algorithms and tools they learn about in their classrooms work ‘under the hood’. We believe that a more profound understanding is achieved when we can compare and visualize the performance of various tools and techniques ourselves, ultimately leading to writing our own programs.

Why PyTrans?

Transportation has always been a multidisciplinary field, but it has never been more so until now. Today, there seems no daylight between the fields of transportation and information technology. Current research in transportation necessitates knowledge of some aspects of information technology, high level programming, big data analytics, simulation, autonomous and connected vehicles, advanced sensor technologies, and so on. Undergraduate and graduate curricula in many civil engineering departments have been slow in keeping pace with the rapid changes in the transportation industry. Therefore, we feel that there is an urgent need for a forum where students and researchers can learn from each other as they prepare to solve the complex challenges facing the transportation industry in the future.

Who are we?

We are graduate students at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Irvine.