Getting blindsided by log-jammed traffic comes as a surprise to most commuters, but according to a Portland State University professor it doesn’t have to be that way.

Robert Bertini, an associate professor at PSU’s school of urban studies, says despite the state’s best technology and most astute mathematical minds, determining travel times for Oregon’s roads is an art form – an imprecise art form that requires greater precision to make it beneficial to commuters and businesses alike.

Bertini is uniquely aware of the issues confronting travel-time projections on Oregon’s arterial roads, the primary thoroughfares for freight traffic. In addition to being a professor, he’s the director of the Oregon Transportation and Research Consortium, which studies issues pertaining to multi-modal transportation.

Through his research, Bertini’s come to the conclusion that although Oregon does an adequate job of projecting travel times, a lot of work still has to be done in order to make the research applicable to the layperson who doesn’t understand complicated mathematical algorithms.

“We’ve found that most of the time, travel-time estimates are pretty good, but there are plenty of times when they break down a little bit,” Bertini said. “One of the solutions would be to place additional sensors out into the field to do a better job of determining what travel times might be.”

The Oregon Department of Transportation currently uses ramp-side sensors to track the movement and speeds of vehicles on the state’s roadways. The problem, however, is that the sensors only exist on ramps, meaning the information between those points gets lost.

That creates headaches for agencies like TriMet, ODOT and Metro, which must first compile data – a tricky undertaking in its own right – to eventually make mathematical sense out of the information. In other words, predicting the future of traffic.

But roadside sensors are only one piece of the puzzle.

“Once ODOT feels comfortable with the algorithms they use and the validations we have, they will expand the program and make these travel times available,” Bertini said.

Information concerning travel times on major corridors exists, but it is not easy to access and would not make sense to the non-mathematically inclined. What Bertini proposes for the future – and what he’s worked with ODOT to accomplish – is providing more information, whether it comes from cell phones, the Internet or roadside signs.

But Brian Gregor, a transportation planning manager at ODOT, considers some of those measures to be unfeasible. While he’d like to see more information about travel times made available to people, he maintains that it has to be done smartly.

Triangulating the location of commuters using cell phones, for example, tends to break down in slower speeds, meaning congestion renders the findings untrustworthy, Gregor says. And even the mere mention of employing global positions systems brings up public concerns about privacy, he adds.

“Theoretically, we should be able to get good travel times over our network, but the question is always how we do that,” Gregor said. “Right now, we don’t have any means of collecting travel times on the whole system.”

And, he cautions that will become a more pronounced issue in the next few years as bridge construction and rehabilitation continue on some of Oregon’s busiest roads.