Dartmouth Student Team Creates Award-Winning Tool for More Bike-Walk-Friendly Town Planning

Andrei Gerashchenko Th'24 and Raif Olson '24 Th'24 conduct a test of the Bike-Walk Census Tool in November, 2023. (Photo by Wendell Wu '23 Th'24)

"We built a person-counter using an object detection algorithm to see how many people pass through an area over a given time," said team member Raif Olson '24 Th'24. The project, titled "Bike Walk Census Tool Designed for More Inclusive Transportation Planning in College Downtown," was completed by Olson and fellow students Jake Twarog '24, Wendell Wu '23 Th'24, Andrei Gerashchenko Th'24, and Zachary Nelson-Marois '24 Th'24.

For the past century, traffic engineers have routinely designed landscapes that favor cars over people. This is partly because existing systems regularly count cars to gauge road usage patterns, whereas pedestrians and cyclists are counted only sporadically using tedious and error-prone manual processes.

When the students found that existing alternatives were either expensive, cumbersome, or inaccurate, they set out to build a machine-learning-based solution that's portable, inexpensive, automated, and accurate.

"The problem of counting pedestrians is hard to solve with traditional methods," continued Olson. "So it was really cool to apply this algorithm I was learning to this problem that impacts all the people who live in, or even visit, Hanover, because you need to be able to count people to build good infrastructure."

For any town or city, the type of data collected by the students' Bike-Walk Census Tool is crucial for designing safe and equitable streets, sidewalks, and other structures as well as to verify the impacts of new designs.

Raif Olson '24 Th'24 (l) accepted the award from Marc Morin, PE, on behalf of his team. (Photo by Catha Mayor)

"We brought this project forward because in order to count people walking and biking, we would have to organize humans to sit and physically count for hours," said Jennie Chamberlain, a Hanover Select Board member and chair of the Hanover Bike-Walk Committee, the project's sponsor. "We'll be able to tackle a lot of problems and issues with a device that runs on its own. It will not only save time, but also enable us to think more holistically about where and how people move around. And if we use it from year to year, we'll be able to see how the town is evolving as we adjust the infrastructure to better accommodate people walking and biking."

"NCEES and its member licensing boards are committed to promoting professional licensure as a means of protecting the public," said Marc Morin, a member of the NH Board of Professional Engineers who presented the award at a ceremony yesterday. "This award recognizes programs that help with this endeavor by fostering a partnership between students and professional engineers."

The Dartmouth student team verified their specifications with two licensed professional engineers who work in transportation design and are passionate about inclusivity.

"Real-world problems get students to think critically and apply what they're learning to messy challenges," remarked Vicki May, one of the team's faculty advisors. "They have to scope the project, work with users to design solutions, and then test those solutions. It's what they're going to see when they go out in professional practice. It can be frustrating, but it's worth it."

Additional faculty advisors were Sol Diamond and Rafe Steinhauer.