By Amy Vogel ’20

I am writing this post while sitting at my desk on my last day of work at the Technion.

I am sad to leave the Technion, but I am so happy that I made the decision to go abroad for the semester, experience full-time research, and immerse myself in different cultures.

I met up with an old friend in Tel Aviv (“Yalla” is Arabic / Hebrew slang for “let’s go!”)

In the past few weeks, I have been working on modeling the highway *with* HOT lanes on TransModeler. (Up until a few weeks ago, we were working on getting the MATLAB model working with the current state of the highway, and now we are modeling the hypothetical.) The Ayalon is a private highway in Israel, and we were able to use un-implemented plans for HOT lanes, sent to us directly from the Ayalon office, in designing the HOT lanes for our model.

Actually designing the HOT roads (e.g. figuring out where the lane should separate from the highway and where it should come back together) brought to my attention all the different factors that go into planning roads. For example, if the HOT lane is all the way on the left, and the road is splitting off in different directions, how do you design the HOT lane to also split in those directions while keeping it on the left?

In addition to the TransModeler design, I spent the past few weeks finalizing the MATLAB code that I wrote. I mainly wrote two programs; one program is used to convert the format of the TransModeler output into something that we can use; the other program calculates the average travel times along different routes in the simulation.

I want to thank everyone who has welcomed me at the Technion! It was a really great experience, and I recommend that any undergraduate reading this to take some time to focus on a single project — either during the summer or a semester — because learning outside of the classroom is invaluable, and you’ll return to the classroom feeling refreshed.

The Technion Civil & Environmental Engineering Dean threw a pool party for the whole department! 

Outside a very scenic spot in Haifa

Amy Vogel ’20 is studying abroad in Israel at the Technion this semester, where she is working alongside Tomer Toledo, PhD ’03. Her abroad experiences have been facilitated by MISTI MIT-Israel.