The Miller award will provide OTREC with the funding to develop a Transportation Sustainability Roadmap for Oregon. This roadmap will guide research, education and partnership initiatives, establishing the foundation for creating sustainable transportation research, education, and community engagement activities. The project will build momentum on a number of efforts currently underway including OTREC’s participation in the Oregon Environmental Council (OEC) workshop for transportation professionals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and involvement in the development of the Best Practices Manual for a ìClean, Green and Smartî West Coast transportation corridor system and other national efforts through the U.S. Department of Transportation. This project will leverage the expertise of staff and partner faculty researchers in order to develop a more focused approach to sustainable transportation.
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A major aspect of transportation planning is understanding behavior: how to predict it and how to influence it over the long term. Transportation models typically emphasize policy variables such as travel time and cost. While clearly important, we hypothesize that other variables may be just as influential, namely, variables related to environmental consequences such as greenhouse gas emissions. This work is motivated by several factors. First, there is evidence from behavioral economics in non-transport domains that providing personalized information regarding environmental impact can significantly modify behavior. Second, applications to transport appear to have potential as many studies find that environmental consciousness influences transport behavior. Third, there are a growing number of transportation websites that are reporting environmental savings. Finally, smartphones provide the technological means to provide real-time, person-specific travel information regarding trip times, costs, and environmental impacts. Results from a computer laboratory experiment will be presented, which indicate that providing informing regarding environmental impacts significantly increases sustainable behaviors. Further, the experiments suggest a “value of green” of around 44-84 cents per pound of CO2 savings.
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“We are faced with a grave crisis that may change our way of life forever. We live in a civilization that evolved on the promise of an endless supply of cheap oil. The era of cheap oil will end, probably much sooner than most people realize. To put this looming crisis in perspective, and to judge its significance, it helps to start from the beginning.”
In this presentation Dr. Goodstein examines the rapid disappearance of oil and predicts its depletion will arrive much sooner than projected. Imagining a world caught suddenly, and perhaps unprepared, without oil, Dr. Goodstein discusses the alternatives and their implications for the environment.
Lewison Lem, Principal Consultant of Parsons Brinckerhoff, on reducing the climate impact of the transportation system.
View paper: Transportation Strategies to Mitigate Climate Change
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Abstract: Would a logistics service provider be a success story, if its services are called; "A logistics assistant for households and a partner for retail and other services"? And would shopping malls be more environmentally friendly, if they have their "virtual duplicate" with delivery services?
This talk will focus on a project in the Helsinki area now in its early piloting phase, called SeuLo, an abbreviation from Sustainable Urban Logistics. SeuLo-service may be characterized by the slogan: “A logistics assistant for households and a neutral partner for e-retail and other services.” The idea is to have a viewpoint of a household with its different logistics needs, rather than a viewpoint of different retailers or other services. This idea, after it was found, is very simple and natural, but its implementation as a demand chain network is complicated and has to be opened up using a “step by step” approach. Using the SeuLo-service, a household may shop from different e-retailers: grocery, local and organic food producers, pharmacy, laundry services or order books from public library in a consolidated order and have these parcels delivered as a single shipment.
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During the March 2011 earthquake/ tsunami/nuclear disaster, the internet filled with stories of how something quite ordinary in Japanese life became an important lifeline—the bicycle. For example an 83-year-old woman escaped the tsunami by bicycle, and due to public-transport disruptions, bicycle stores sold out of bicycles as quickly as supermarkets sold out of food. However not just in disasters, but in daily life, the most reliable, sustainable form of transportation, next to walking, is via Japan’s estimated 80,000,000 bicycles, affectionately called mamachari.
This illustrated presentation, based on four-years of cultural-landscape research culminating the publication of世界が称賛した日本の町の秘密 (Secrets of Japanese Cities the World Admires. Tokyo: Yousensha, 2011), begins by discussing why mamachari are perfect for local transportation and the many practical ways Japanese use them. It then explores why many of Japan’s densely populated, fine-grained neighborhoods with auto-resistant narrow streets and nearby shopping, make ideal bicycle neighborhoods. Issues explored will include the mamachari’s impact on: neighborhood livability; sustainability; public health through active transportation; fostering direct human contact not possible with motor-car travel; and maintaining the compact human scale of communities by...
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The video begins at 9:39.
I-5 is the only continuous north/south interstate highway on the West Coast, providing a commerce link for the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In the Vancouver-Portland region, I-5 is one of two major highways that provide interstate connectivity and mobility. Operation of the I-5 crossing over the Columbia River is directly influenced by the 5-mile segment of I-5 between SR 500 in Vancouver and Columbia Boulevard in Portland. This segment includes interchanges with three state highways (SR 14, SR 500, and SR 501) and five major arterial roadways that serve a variety of land uses, and provides access to downtown Vancouver, two international ports, industrial centers, residential neighborhoods, retail centers, and recreational areas.
The existing I-5 crossing of the Columbia River consists of two side-by-side bridges, built four decades apart. The crossing, which served 30,000 vehicles per day in the 1960s, now carries more than 130,000 automobiles, buses, and trucks each weekday. The bridges are stretched far beyond capacity—the hours of stop-and-go traffic grow every year. As the metropolitan region grows, mobility and accessibility for automobile, vehicular freight, and transit will decline...
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