The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) announces the opportunity to apply for grants to support implementation or translation of research results.
- Activity aimed at assisting local agencies or partners in implementing research results. This can be in the form of an in-person workshop, on-line webinar, development of a “how to” or training video, handbook, guidebook, software/spreadsheet tools, etc.
- Refining or developing and disseminating tools that can be used by practitioners, students, or researchers to further the state of the practice.
Roger Lindgren, a professor of civil engineering at the Oregon Institute of Technology and a member of NITC’s executive committee, was recently awarded the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Western District Outstanding Transportation Educator Award.
He was presented with the award at the ITE Western District’s annual meeting, held this year in Las Vegas.
The group of Oregon Tech students who traveled to the meeting with Dr. Lindgren also competed in the student traffic bowl, where they made it to the final round and took third place out of 12 schools.
The success of the traffic bowl team is another indicator of the strength of Oregon Tech's transportation program.
The outstanding educator award is not an annual award. It is only provided in years when there is an outstanding recipient, someone who demonstrates extraordinary creativity in teaching and takes exceptional measures to spark student interest in the transportation profession.
Lindgren, known at Oregon Tech for his...
Read more
Seven dedicated students spent their summer days in TREC’s offices at PSU this year, working to transform the Bike-Ped Portal project from a dream into a reality.
TREC already houses Portal, a vast collection of Portland-area traffic and transit data, and NITC researchers saw a need for a database on the national scale for non-motorized transportation modes.
Research associate Krista Nordback launched the NITC pooled-fund project, Online Non-motorized Traffic Count Archive, with co-investigator Kristen Tufte in the spring of 2014. A year ago, Bike-Ped Portal was little more than an idea.
Now it contains roughly four million individual records of bicycle, pedestrian and even equestrian movements in five states.
High school interns Jolene Liu, Tomas Ramirez, Tara Sengupta, Gautum Singh, Kim Le, Max Fajardo and Kimberly Kuhn worked full time for weeks in order to convert piles of unsorted documentation into usable formats.
Nordback engaged the team of interns through Saturday Academy, a...
Read more
A NITC research project from Portland State University introduces a method of cleaning up land use data, for use in improved transportation models.
Transportation and land use are closely interdependent. Considerable work is underway, in Oregon and elsewhere, to develop models that integrate the two.
Planners creating these models often spend the bulk of their time preparing data on the various land uses. Many times the data, gathered from diverse sources, is incomplete and requires the planner to find missing information to fill in the gaps.
In fields outside of transportation, there have been considerable advances in techniques to do this. Data-mining and machine-learning techniques have been developed, for example, to systematically detect fraud in credit data, reconcile medical records and clean up information on the web.
In the transportation modeling community, by contrast, most efforts to tackle the problem are tied to a specific model system and a chosen study area. Few have produced reusable tools for processing land use data.
Liming Wang, lead investigator of the project Continuous Data Integration for Land Use and Transportation Planning and Modeling, offers such reusable...
Read more
On creating civic engagement, driving density and sharing a stage with the 'funniest person on earth'
Our cities reflect how we choose to live. Increasingly, we choose to live alone.
Eric Klinenberg spent seven years researching people who live alone for his book “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.” Klinenberg will discuss the implications for the future of transportation as keynote speaker for the Transportation and Communities Summit on Monday, Sept. 15.
> More information on the Transportation and Communities Summit
> Register now!
Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, came to the topic after an earlier investigation into isolation. Instead of a problem, however, he found the sort of vitality that drives civic participation.
People who live alone, Klinenberg said, make cities vibrant places by nourishing the “social infrastructure”: the places and institutions that support people’s public lives.
“When countries invest in public amenities, including transit, they make it easier for...
Millennials prefer walking over driving by a substantially wider margin than any other generation, according to a new poll conducted by the National Association of Realtors and TREC, the Transportation Research and Education Center at Portland State University.
The 2015 National Community and Transportation Preference Survey found that millennials, those aged 18 to 34, prefer walking as a mode of transportation by 12 percentage points over driving. Millennials are also shown to prefer living in attached housing, living within walking distance of shops and restaurants, and having a short commute, and are the most likely age group to make use of public transportation.
The poll also found that millennials show a stronger preference than other generations for expanding public transportation and providing transportation alternatives to driving, such as biking and walking, while also increasing the availability of trains and buses. Millennials likewise favor developing communities where people do not need to drive long distances to work or shop.
> Jennifer Dill of TREC and Hugh Morris of NAR will discuss the findings in a free Webinar Aug. 5....
Read more
A project led by Portland State University researchers Chris Monsere and Miguel Figliozzi has been nationally recognized as one of sixteen high value research projects by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO).
Each year at its annual meeting, AASHTO's Research Advisory Committee selects four projects from each of its four regions to form a "Sweet Sixteen" group of important and influential projects.
The project, “Operational Guidance for Bicycle-Specific Traffic Signals,” reviewed the current state of practice for bicycle signals and evaluated cyclist performance characteristics at intersections. The research has been used to inform an FHWA Interim Approval for bicycle signals.
Bike signals are beginning to be common in major cities throughout the U.S., with some engineering guidance available from the California Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the...
Read more
The Portland, Oregon chapter of WTS awards scholarships each year to help exceptional women advance in the field of transportation. Three of the scholarships last fall were awarded to students at NITC member campuses.
With NITC’s support, these students were able to attend the WTS International Conference in Chicago, Illinois May 20-22.
Miranda Barrus, a civil engineering student at the Oregon Institute of Technology, received the Sharon D. Banks Undergraduate Scholarship.
This was her first time attending the WTS International conference.
“Thanks to NITC, I was able to sit in a banquet room full of hundreds of women engineers,” Barrus said. “Being in the city itself was also a wonderful opportunity, seeing different sights and utilizing different forms of transit.”
Rae-Leigh Stark, a first year Masters of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) student at PSU, was awarded the Gail Achterman Leadership Scholarship. She described the conference as an “awesome opportunity.”
Keynote speaker Erin Brockovich was a high point for Stark, who appreciated Brockovich’s narrative of standing up for her beliefs and facing challenges with humor....
Read more
The NITC program has selected three dissertation fellows for the spring 2015 round of dissertation funding.
Steve Gerhke, a civil and environmental engineering student at Portland State University, will research land use mixing and the impact it has on active travel.
His work will examine the relationship between land use mix and walking trips, mode choice and active travel behavior forecasting. Gehrke’s research aims to provide greater specificity to policymakers and practitioners interested in the active travel outcomes associated with increasing land use mix.
Christine Kendrick of PSU’s environmental science and management program will study the urban roadway atmospheric environment.
Kendrick proposes that urban arterial environments, with their high traffic volumes and wide mix of road users, are important targets for efforts to reduce travelers’ exposure to traffic-related air pollution. She hopes to advance research in this area by providing improved exposure assessment and exploration of mitigation strategies.
Nicholas Perdue, a geography student at the University of Oregon, will explore pedestrian modeling and agent cognition.
His dissertation is an extension of a current NITC project, Agent Based Model Simulating Pedestrian Behavioral Responses to Environmental Structural Changes, led by his faculty advisors Amy...
Read more
The NITC program’s executive committee has awarded around $1.5 million in funding for 16 research projects. The projects reflect NITC’s theme as the national university transportation center for livable communities: safe, healthy and sustainable transportation choices to foster livable communities.
This funding round included a special focus on research examining economic effects of transportation. Funded projects on this focus area looked at urban greenways, location affordability in shrinking cities, transportation affordability in developments near transit, smart-parking programs and effects of bus rapid transit on surrounding property values.
Principal investigators on funded projects represent four of the five NITC program campuses: eight projects from Portland State University, three each from the University of Utah and the University of Oregon and two from the University of South Florida. The Oregon Institute of Technology is also a NITC member campus.
Eleven projects involve collaboration between multiple researchers, with two...