PSU Transportation Seminar: Oregon in Motion: Shaping Communities Through State Transportation Legislation
Friday, May 3, 2024, 11:30am to 12:30pm PDT
Friday Transportation Seminars at Portland State University have been a tradition since 2000. We've opened up PSU Transportation Seminars to other days of the week, but the format is the same: Feel free to bring your lunch! If you can't join us in person, you can always watch online via Zoom.
THE TOPIC
About every eight years, the Oregon state legislature passes a large state transportation funding package. Transportation funding packages in Oregon have historically included funding mechanisms such as the gas tax, program areas such as Safe Routes to School, projects such as freeway widenings, and transparency and accountability measures such as establishing new reporting requirements and advisory committees. The way this legislation is developed and who has a seat at the table highly influences package contents and the public and political support needed for its passage. In this presentation, I will provide highlights from my recently published report, Oregon in Motion (PDF), which covers the development, content, and impacts of HB 2017 - Oregon's most recent transportation package - and previews what is to come with the next package anticipated for 2025.
KEY LEARNING...
Read morePSU Transportation Seminar: Forest Service Engineering, Lessons and Opportunities
Friday, May 17, 2024, 11:30am to 12:30pm PDT
Friday Transportation Seminars at Portland State University have been a tradition since 2000. We've opened up PSU Transportation Seminars to other days of the week, but the format is the same: Feel free to bring your lunch! If you can't join us in person, you can always watch online via Zoom.
THE TOPIC
Working in the Forest Service Engineering has different challenges and benefits than other common organizations for Civil Engineers or Transportation Planners. This presentation should provide a perspective on how we utilize dynamic tensions to reach consensus, how we apply lessons learned across disciplines and agencies, and share opportunities for growth and learning.
KEY LEARNING OUTCOMES
- An introduction to Forest Service, the engineering done in the agency and how history shapes today's work.
- Transportation Planning across landscapes, planning for access absent residents/permanent job sites.
- Resolving conflict from competing goals and missions.
SPEAKER
Joe Totten, Assistant Regional Transportation Engineer/Shared Roads Systems Specialist, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service Region 6
Joe Totten is an engineer with USDA-Forest Service. He has worked in municipal government, state government, a transit...
Read morePSU Transportation Seminar: Streets are for People! Livable Streets 2.0 and Five Decades of the Conflict, Power and Promise of our Streets
Friday, May 31, 2024, 11:30am to 12:30pm PDT
Friday Transportation Seminars at Portland State University have been a tradition since 2000. We've opened up PSU Transportation Seminars to other days of the week, but the format is the same: Feel free to bring your lunch! If you can't join us in person, you can always watch online via Zoom.
THE TOPIC
Streets constitute the majority of our urban public spaces, yet we struggle everyday with how they should be designed and operated for travel, safety, and livability.
In 1969, when Dr. Bruce Appleyard was 4 years old, he was hit by a car and nearly killed. Around that time his father, Donald Appleyard, started work on what would become Livable Streets, published in 1981 – a ground-breaking and seminal work, the product of more than a decade of rigorous research and thoughtful analysis that would uncover the ill effects of traffic and laying out the seminal arguments that streets are for people.
On September 23, 1982, a year after Livable Streets was published, Donald Appleyard was killed by a speeding, drunk driver in Athens, Greece—it was never reprinted. And so it goes, one of the most important books on street safety and livability was itself bookended by two horrific events of traffic violence. In 2021, Dr. Bruce Appleyard published an updated version,...
Read moreWebinar: Building Capacity in Gateway Communities through the GNAR Academy
Wednesday, June 12, 2024, 10:00am to 11:00am PDT
OVERVIEW
Small towns and cities near national parks, public lands, and other natural amenities across the West are experiencing rapid growth and increased tourism. As we have documented via our prior NITC-funded research, this has created a range of big city challenges for these “gateway communities,” particularly in the form of interconnected transportation, land use, and housing issues. Seeking to help gateway communities better prepare for and respond to their transportation and planning challenges, the Gateway and Natural Amenity Region (GNAR) Initiative team translated the findings from our research on planning and development challenges in gateway communities into an online learning program.
This program, the "GNAR Academy Fundamentals: Foundations for Planning and Collaboration in Gateway Communities and Regions" includes seven modules, each of which highlights key skills for addressing transportation and planning issues in gateway communities. This Fundamentals course will be an entry point for the rest of the GNAR Academy, which is currently in development.
In this webinar, we will introduce the GNAR Academy and Fundamentals course, explain how the course was developed, and share how we anticipate the course will result in improved transportation, planning, and development decisions in gateway communities and regions...
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