On June 24th, ITE Manitoba will be holding a webinar featuring Richard Tebinka & Don McRitchie of WSP Canada Inc. who will be presenting on the Winnipeg South Perimeter project, and Sushreeta Mishra, winner of this year’s Kean Lew Memorial Student Paper Competition. The webinar will be hosted by Steven Florko of MORR Transportation Consulting Ltd., and ITE Manitoba President.
Webinar Networking
We have decided to try something new with this webinar format – the webinar will begin with approximately 10 minutes of breakout groups. This will give participants the chance to catch up and network for a few minutes before the presentations, just like the in-person days!
Speaker 1 and 2
Richard Tebinka is WSP’s Manager – Manitoba Transportation, and the office lead for the Lombard office. Richard has a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Lakehead University, and a Master of Applied Science from the University of Waterloo. Richard is a registered Professional Engineer in Manitoba, Ontario, and Saskatchewan, a Fellow of ITE, and spent 10 years on the Manitoba Section executive. He is a member of TAC’s Mobility Management Committee, and co-author of a just published TAC report on “Public Engagement in Sustainable Mobility Projects”, and a Past-President of ACEC Manitoba.
Richard was the Project Manager for the recently completed “South Perimeter Highway Design Study, and Functional Design for the Future St. Norbert Bypass” project for Manitoba Infrastructure, and the Senior Advisor on the current Owner’s Engineer assignment for the Design Build of an interchange and related roadworks at PTH 100 and PR 200 (St. Mary’s Road).
Don McRitchie is a Senior Project Manager with WSP Canada with over 40 years of experience in transportation engineering with federal, provincial and private sector agencies. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Manitoba. Most of his career has been with Manitoba Infrastructure (MI) where his initial focus was construction management. That transitioned into design engineering, where he was the Senior Detailed Design engineer for the Province with responsibility for design standards, design studies, and the review of all transportation designs.
Later in his career, Don was the inaugural head of the Capital Projects Branch which had responsibility for the largest capital works and the first alternative delivery projects undertaken in Manitoba. In that role, Don was the project manager for the South Perimeter Highway Design Study completed in 2020. He is currently the Deputy Project Manager for WSP’s Owner’s Engineer assignment from MI for the Design-Build project for an interchange at PTH 100 and PR 200 (St. Mary’s Road).
Richard and Don will be presenting on the South Perimeter Project:
The South Perimeter forms the south link of the Perimeter Highway around the City of Winnipeg. It is approximately 42 km in length and travels through four municipalities. Tied to this project is the St. Norbert Bypass, with travels through a fifth municipality. The Province of Manitoba has committed to examining the South Perimeter to bring it up to freeway standards, with 22 grade separations, including interchanges, river crossings, and rail grade separations. Currently there is a mix of interchanges, at-grade intersections, and at-grade rail crossings.
There were a number of challenges along the corridor that needed to be addressed in development of the recommended plan, including coordinating with a separate Provincial review for short term safety improvements.
Alternative interchange types were examined, however, adjacent constraints often limited the types of interchanges that could be considered. Configurations considered at the various locations included cloverleafs, Parclos, trumpet, diamonds, diverging diamonds, and hybrids.
Addressing the concerns and desires of stakeholders, such as active transportation proponents, environmental proponents, protecting public parks, a Scouts Canada campsite, the Seine River (canoe travel, pedestrians, cyclists, and wildlife crossings), were among the many challenges.
Since completion of the study in 2020, the Province announced the construction of the first new interchange at PTH 100 and PR 200 (St. Mary’s Road) as a design-build project. This presentation will provide an overview of the project and discuss what is planned at the St. Mary’s Road location.
Speaker 3
Sushreeta Mishra is a senior year Ph.D. student in Transportation Engineering (Dept. of Civil Eng.) at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. It’s also her first year as a member and secretary of the ITE University of Manitoba Student Chapter.
Sushreeta’s work experience includes working as a part-time researcher at CUTRIC on an electric bus scheduling project. As a delegate selected from Manitoba for the Young Leaders Summit in Calgary (2019), she got a unique opportunity to learn, showcase ideas, and network with peers and industry experts in transit and sustainable transportation. Sushreeta’s primary research interest is in transit operations and planning, and her Ph.D. thesis focuses on optimizing the operation of semi-flexible transit for low-demand conditions.
Sushreeta will be presenting on Stochastic Optimization of Semi-Flexible Transit Operations:
Semi-flexible transit (SFT) is commonly discussed as a cost-effective alternative to serving public transportation users in low demand conditions. Despite its considerable potential, implementation of SFT is limited due to two primary operating challenges: (a) fluctuating travel demand and (b) service unreliability. Most researchers recently are rigorously involved in developing complex algorithms and heuristics to handle operational planning issues while a very few focused on optimization of variables for SFT operation involving tactical decision making. Moreover, the optimization of decision variables are largely based on a single dimension of stochasticity, demand only. The present study proposes a methodology to optimize two decision variables, service headway and proportion of requests accepted for curb-to-curb service per trip while operating SFT following a route-deviation operating policy. Implementing stochasticity in both demand and vehicle arrival, we perform multi-objective optimization with two conflicting objectives as minimization of operator cost and user cost. Pertaining to vehicle delays and demand variability linked to values of decision variables in the Pareto set, we define the risks associated with selecting each value for attaining Pareto optimality. The risk is proportionate to occurrence of a decision variable value in the Pareto set. The presented methodology can be adopted as a decision support tool to establish planning policies to optimize SFT operation while considering interests of both operator and user.
