/ Modified mar 10, 2022 10:55 a.m.

New University of Arizona research center established to help solve traffic issues

The Center for Applied Transportation Sciences receives funding from the city, county and state

360 traffic cone tucson A traffic cone along Speedway Boulevard as traffic passes in the background.
AZPM Staff

If you live in Tucson, or at least drive in the city, you know the roads are rough, and other transportation options are limited. To address that, the city, county and state are now funding a new University of Arizona research center that will work on long-term solutions to those problems.

Yao-Jan Wu heads the new Center for Applied Transportation Sciences in the College of Engineering and said the goal of the center’s research is to alleviate traffic, bring down emissions and reduce traffic fatalities in the state.

"We also promote education and training programs to develop the workforce, so we want to train more traffic engineers for our city and for our region," Wu said.

The center gets funds from partners across the state, but the Arizona Department of Transportation, Pima County and the City of Tucson provide the most support and have already contributed $400,000 total.

"We wanted everyone to put their resources together, so we can solve a bigger issue instead of each agency contributing funding to solve a particular small-scale issue," Wu said.

The center will bring together researchers from the College of Engineering and the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture.

By posting comments, you agree to our
AZPM encourages comments, but comments that contain profanity, unrelated information, threats, libel, defamatory statements, obscenities, pornography or that violate the law are not allowed. Comments that promote commercial products or services are not allowed. Comments in violation of this policy will be removed. Continued posting of comments that violate this policy will result in the commenter being banned from the site.

By submitting your comments, you hereby give AZPM the right to post your comments and potentially use them in any other form of media operated by this institution.
AZPM is a service of the University of Arizona and our broadcast stations are licensed to the Arizona Board of Regents who hold the trademarks for Arizona Public Media and AZPM. We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples.
The University of Arizona