Transportation & Communities 2018: Academy Edition

Transportation professionals often need to survey users to better plan, design, and engineer our system. But, we often don't get the answers we really need, either because we don't ask the right questions, the right people, or enough people. This workshop will cover the basics of designing and implementing an effective survey, whether it be via mail, on-line, or in person.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
After this workshop you will have a better understanding of how to...

• Plan and implement an effective survey to use in practice
• Write survey questions to get the answers you need
• Get a higher response rate

 
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CREDITS
This half-day workshop is eligible for 3.5 hours of professional development credit through AICP (see our provider summary). We can provide an electronic attendance certificate for other types of certification maintenance.

Remember that stats class you took in college? If you’re like most, probably not. But, you have some data you need to analyze – a survey, traffic counts, crash data – and use in a memo or report to your boss, client, commission, the public, etc.. How do you know if the differences you see are “statistically significant”? Do you use a Chi-square or t-test? Row percent or column percent? How do you write up those findings? What do those regression model results someone shared really mean? This workshop will provide a refresher on how to analyze quantitative data, including the most common statistical tests, and how to write about data – all using Excel.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
After this workshop you will have a better understanding of:

• What statistical test to use in what situations
• How to write about the results from statistical tests, without being too technical
• How to do basic data analysis in Excel

     
 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CREDITS
This half-day workshop is eligible for 3.5 hours of professional development credit through AICP (see our provider summary). We can provide an electronic attendance certificate for other types of certification maintenance.

*This is the only full day workshop we're offering at TCA2018 this year. The cost of this full-day workshop is $190 (general admission) and $100 (student rate).

Large transportation-related data sets are becoming increasingly available to practitioners. Newfound access to these large data sets may outstrip the ability of even savvy data analysts.  The use of R, an open source statistical computing language, can greatly improve an analyst’s productivity and increase their skill set.

R allows users to:

• retrieve, merge, format and clean data, 
• perform data augmentations, 
• perform analyses, 
• produce summary graphics, and 
• make the process repeatable and shareable.

This workshop will showcase applications from other organizations that use R and transportation related data, highlight best practices, and provide reproducible examples for users that wish to learn and use R using PORTAL and PORTAL data. After finishing this workshop, participants will have a better understanding of the applications of using R with large unruly data. Participants should have a basic knowledge of data analysis and an interest in learning R.  

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Participants unfamiliar with R will come away with a better understanding its applications and utility in analyzing large datasets from reproducible examples and showcase of other work products from other organizations.
• Statistics is scary for some people but R can remove some of the barriers and make the application of advanced statistic more approachable.  Participants will have reproducible examples that demonstrate how to examine common data sets used in transportation.
• Communicating the story is vital for good decision making.  Wrangling and analyzing data can fall short without a compelling story and the picture to help illustrate the lessons.  Participants will learn the offerings from R for visualization techniques to help make the most of the lessons they glean from their data analysis efforts. 

 
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CREDITS
This full-day workshop is eligible for 7 hours of professional development credit through AICP (see our provider summary). We can provide an electronic attendance certificate for other types of certification maintenance.