The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) is proud to introduce our four Summer 2020 Dissertation Fellows, together awarded $60,000 in total funding. Read about their projects below, or learn how to apply for funding through the NITC Dissertation Fellowship Grant.
Travis Glick, Portland State University
Travis Glick is a PhD student, graduate teaching and research assistant in civil & environmental engineering at Portland State University. He served for two years as president of Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning (STEP), Portland State University's transportation student group. Travis is a NITC scholar and three-time Eisenhower fellow, and his ongoing research examines dwell times, bus-bike conflicts, and transit modeling. Travis's doctoral work tackles a new class of problem that... Read more
Robert Hibberd is a Ph.D. student and Graduate Research Assistant in the University of Arizona's College of Architecture, Planning & Landscape Architecture. His research emphasis is on urban and transportation planning, demographics, Smart Growth and New Urbanism, housing affordability issues, and sustainable development. He has worked on multiple NITC projects including LRT/BRT/SCT/CRT Development Outcomes FINAL PHASE and Updating and Expanding LRT/BRT/SCT/CRT Data and Analysis with his advisor, Dr. Arthur C. Nelson. He is a 2020 NITC dissertation fellow.
LinkedIn | Twitter | NITC Researcher Profile
Tell us about yourself?
Robert E. Hibberd grew up in Syracuse, Utah, north of Salt Lake City. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Utah, and a Master’s degree in Historical Resources Management,...
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Advances in transportation technology — e-scooters and bike share, Lyft & Uber, and autonomous vehicles — are beginning to have profound impacts on cities. New mobility is changing not only how we travel, but also urban form and development itself. In the near future, we can expect differences in what public transit looks like, the layout of cities, and the places we spend our time. In turn,...
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Tell us about yourself?
I am entering my second year in the Master of City and Metropolitan Planning program at the University of Utah. I’m originally from Ashville, Ohio and I received my B.S. in civil engineering from Ohio Northern University in 2019. Shortly after, I picked up from Ohio and moved to Salt Lake City where I’ve been enjoying hiking around in the Wasatch Mountains and exploring a new city outside of my studies.
What (or who) has influenced your career path in transportation?
Ever since I was a little kid, I could be found studying, or drawing maps. The transportation system as a whole has always been a curiosity of mine and ultimately...
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- Download the Final Report (PDF)
- Download the Project Brief (PDF)
- Read the Multiyear Summary Report: Transit-Oriented Development in Portland: Multiyear Summary Report of Portland State University Surveys (PDF)
- Watch the June 2020 Webinar: Findings From 15 Years Of Travel Surveys At Portland Area Transit-oriented Developments (TODs)
Does living in a transit-oriented development (TOD) actually change the way people travel? That's the fundamental question that 15 years of research in Portland, Oregon seeks...
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The University of Utah has a new transportation faculty member: Andy Hong, formerly the Lead Urban Health Scientist at the University of Oxford's George Institute for Global Health. At Oxford, Hong has been co-leading an effort to establish a center devoted to the "new science of cities and health." His research in that area is focused on active transportation and its correlates with human and public health.
Andy is also Co-founder of the Healthy Cities Network, a global nexus of innovators dedicated to sharing cutting-edge information on urban health. He has collaborated actively with international experts, particularly for the development of evidence-based policy solutions to a wide range of global health challenges, from promoting physical activity to reducing the environmental burden of disease in marginalized communities. Learn more about Andy Hong.
The University of Utah is pleased to welcome this new addition to their faculty, and looks forward to working with Dr. Hong to improve communities.
The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) is one of seven U.S. Department of Transportation...
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Approximately 7,700 years ago—in a cataclysmic event which the Klamath people retold and passed down for over 300 generations—Mount Mazama erupted, forming Crater Lake in Oregon. With molten rock reaching temperatures of up to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit, complex chemical reactions ensued. The resulting Mazama ash holds some properties that are similar to those in portland cement.
Today, most construction projects use portland cement, which takes an excessive amount of energy to create. Materials are mined from several different sources and transported, then...
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Md Mintu Miah is a Ph.D. student and research assistant in transportation engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is interested in data mining and machine learning in the field of transportation engineering. He obtained his MS in transportation engineering from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and BS in civil engineering from Bangladesh.
Tell us about yourself?
Md Mintu Miah was born in 1989 in a small village of Bangladesh. He obtained his Bachelor Degree on Civil Engineering from Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology (RUET), Bangladesh in 2012. In the year 2014, he joined as a full-time lecturer in the same department and worked until 2017. Later, he obtained his Master's degree in Transportation Engineering from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA (2018). Currently, he is working as a Ph.D. student and Graduate Research Assistant of Transportation Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, USA under the supervision of Professor Stephen P. Mattingly.
What (or who) has influenced your career path in transportation?
The destitute transportation system of my own country and ample research opportunity in the U.S. have jointly influenced me to study in the field of Transportation Engineering. Initially, I was encouraged by my family, colleagues; later, this dream came...
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Authored by PeopleForBikes
According to a new study released by Portland State University’s Transportation Research and Education...
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Authored by Tammy Lee, Transportation Data Manager, Portland State University
For a deeper dive into bicycle volume data, watch the May 8 seminar with Tammy Lee and Kristin Tufte: Creating And Using A Publicly Available Multimodal Transportation Data Archive. Also, check out her earlier blog post on motor vehicle traffic volumes.
The weather these past few weeks has been beautiful: sunny, not too hot, not too cold, cherry trees blossoming… the ideal biking weather marred by a less than ideal pandemic.
Are social distancing measures affecting bike trips in Portland, OR? Maybe. Personally? Yes.
First, let’s get a few things out of the way before we provide summary observations:
Analyzing bike data is not as “easy” as evaluating vehicle traffic data: the infrastructure for monitoring bike (and pedestrian) data isn’t anywhere close to how vehicle traffic is monitored. There just aren’t many bicycle count detectors. So if one detector stops working then what little data that was available in the first place became that much littler.
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