The latest report from The National Institute for Transportation & Communities (NITC) offers help to planners seeking to incorporate emerging travel modes—including car sharing, bike sharing, ride hailing, and autonomous vehicles—into regional travel demand models. More specifically, it brings these new travel modes into the Regional Strategic Planning Model (RSPM) tool. As more people start taking advantage of new...
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Garrett Stephens, Oregon Institute of Technology
Garrett Stephens is Oregon Tech's 2018-19 ITE Student Chapter President and has held civil engineering internships at Kiewit and Lane County Public Works. He was interested in civil engineering from a young age, and has recently decided to pursue a graduate degree with a focus on transportation.
Tell us about yourself?
My name is Garrett Stephens and I am from the Clackamas/Damascus area outside of Portland, Oregon. Growing up, my family owned our own retail paint business where I worked when needed and developed a strong sense of ownership in anything I did. My college career started when I was 16 years old through an early college options program between the homeschool program I was enrolled in and Clackamas Community College. This program allowed me to really step out and develop leadership skills through the classes I took. Outside of academia, I am an avid outdoorsman and love all that Oregon has to offer.
What and/or who has most significantly influenced your path in transportation?
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The latest Small Starts Grant projects, selected by NITC's executive committee, will explore equitable access to mobility options, communicating the applied value of GPS data to agencies, and transportation resiliency in natural disasters.
This annual NITC funding program is a unique opportunity to tackle small-scale ($20,000 or less in scope) research projects. In contrast to our larger, annual flagship program ($30–150K), Small Starts enables us to include researchers who:
- Bring a diverse, interdisciplinary perspective and may not have considered applying a transportation lens to their work before.
- Offer a new voice in the field, whether they’re untenured faculty or a researcher who has not received a NITC grant before.
- Seek to kick-start a larger project by first tackling an exploratory study smaller in scope.
THE NEW PROJECTS
The new projects represent a mix of topics and disciplines across our partner campuses, aimed at supporting and advancing mobility with a focus on creating equitable transportation options. These projects total $60,000 in funding for this round.
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BIKE/PED COUNT SURVEY: CALL FOR INPUT
Researchers at Portland State University, University of Texas at Arlington, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Toole Design Group are conducting a scan to identify locations where bicycle counts are taking place around North America, and hope to enlist your help! If you collect bike count data (or oversee counts) in your jurisdiction, please consider taking our quick survey to tell us a little bit about your count locations and data.
The survey can be accessed here: tinyurl.com/BikeCounterScan
THE NEW PROJECT
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Social marketing can be a useful transportation demand management (TDM) planning approach, to change people's travel behavior. A new NITC study led by Philip Winters and Amy Lester of the University of South Florida's Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) explored a consumer...
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Monica Landgrave-Serrano, University of Arizona
Monica Landgrave-Serrano is a planning masters student at the University of Arizona. She is a NITC student scholar, a TRB Minority Student Fellow, and is currently working as a planning intern with the City of Tucson and also as a graduate research assistant on the NITC-funded project "Access to Opportunities: Redefining Planning Methods and Measures for Disadvantaged Populations." She is the president of UA's Graduate Planning Society, and is helping to build connections with UA transportation students in civil engineering.
Tell us about yourself:
My name is Monica Landgrave-Serrano and I was born in...
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The success of public transportation depends upon public understanding of, and support for, livability. In response to new Oregon state requirements to significantly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from light-duty vehicles, a team of University of Oregon (UO) researchers reviewed public communication strategies around transit investments. The overarching conclusion? The most effective framing of public transportation benefits is not around climate change, but rather on livability. Communication should focus on the benefits to people's pocketbooks, choices, health, and community. While this shift in approach has been marginally applied in Portland, a large gap in connecting...
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We held our annual flagship professional development event, Transportation & Communities, on September 13 and 14. In honor of the event's ten-year anniversary, we changed up the format: Rather than a typical conference with one-hour sessions and a keynote gathering, we offered a selection of intensive half-day workshops. See photos from the event.
The workshops gave practitioners a chance to take a deep dive into new skills in order to walk away with new tools or frameworks that could be applied to their work. We offered a review of congestion mitigation strategies, universal access and equity in pedestrian planning, and discussion on how smart technology could be implemented in suburban communities. Several workshops were based on findings from new research by the National Institute for...
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Keunhyun Park, Assistant Professor at Utah State University, Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
Keunhyun Park graduated from the University of Utah in the spring of 2018, and is now a tenure-track assistant professor at Utah State University. In January 2018 he received a TRB Best Paper Award for "Travel Behavior in TODs vs. non-TODs: Using Cluster Analysis and Propensity Score Matching (PDF)," a paper he coauthored based on a NITC-funded research project with Brenda Scheer and Reid Ewing of the University of Utah. Selection was made by the Transportation and Land Development Committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB).
Tell us about yourself:
I am from South Korea, where I studied landscape architecture for both my undergraduate and...
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Portland, Oregon's 2035 Comprehensive Plan calls for “City Greenways” - a citywide network of park-like streets focused on moving pedestrians and bicycles safely. Such a connected network of safe, welcoming active transportation options could have significant benefits for residents—but which residents?
Benefits of bike and pedestrian infrastructure include environmentally sustainable transportation, livability, and improvements in economic development and public health. While these outcomes are well documented, it is also known that both transportation and...
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