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Civil & Environmental Engineering: Travis Glick
Estimating Reliability Indices and Confidence Intervals for Transit and Traffic at the Corridor Level
As congestion worsens, the importance of rigorous methodologies to estimate travel-time reliability increases. Exploiting fine-granularity transit GPS data, this research proposes a novel method to estimate travel-time percentiles and confidence intervals. Novel transit reliability measures based on travel-time percentiles are proposed to identify and rank low-performance hotspots; the proposed reliability measures can be utilized to distinguish peak-hour low performance from whole-day low performance. As a case study, the methodology is applied to a bus transit corridor in Portland, Oregon. Time-space speed profiles, heatmaps, and visualizations are employed to highlight sections and intersections with high travel-time variability and transit low performance. Segment and intersection travel-time reliability are contrasted against analytical delay formulas at intersections with positive results. If bus stop delays are removed, this methodology can also be applied to estimate regular traffic travel-time variability.
Travis Glick is currently a graduate teaching and research assistant in the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science at Portland State University. He started researching Portland's public transit system in the summer of 2014, this ongoing research has resulted in multiple publications and lectern presentations at the TRB 94th, 95th, and 96th annual meetings. Following the completion of his undergraduate honors thesis at PSU in 2015, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering and is now pursuing a Master of Science degree in civil engineering at PSU. In his free time, Travis loves to hike, sing, play piano and the flute, and read about everything from modern and ancient history to science fiction and fantasy. Most of all, he loves to spend time with his family, friends, and cats, Castor and Pollux.
Urban Studies & Planning: Steven Howland
Current Efforts to Make Bike Share More Equitable: A Survey of System Owners and Operators
The number of public bike share systems has been increasing rapidly across the United States over the past five to ten years. To date most academic research around bike share in the U.S. has focused on the logistics of planning and operationalizing successful systems. Investigations of system users and impacts on the local community are less common, and studies focused on efforts to engage underserved communities in bike share are rarer still. This paper utilizes a survey of representatives from 55 U.S. bike share systems to better understand and document current approaches toward serving low income and minority populations. The survey asked about equity policies and metrics, the degree to which equity considerations affected a variety of system practices, what the existing barriers to utilizing bike share are for target populations, and what challenges the bike share system entity faces in addressing those barriers. Results indicate that one in five systems have written policies around equity, though larger systems (over 500 bikes) were twice as likely to have such policies. However, many more systems incorporated equity into various aspects of their systems. Bike share systems incorporated equity into station siting, fee structure and payment systems, and promotion and marketing at much higher rates (68%, 72%, and 57% respectively), and into system operations and data collection and analysis to a lesser extent (42% each). Even so, the largest barriers facing systems are still cost, access, and outreach to users as well as overall funding and staff levels at the organization level.
Steven Howland is a PhD candidate in Urban Studies at Portland State University. He specializes in economic development and urban poverty. His research interests revolve around disadvantaged populations and the inequalities in transportation, housing, employment, and emerging technologies.