How "Perceived Safety" Plays A Central Role In Improving The Walking Environment
When Kyu Ri Kim was seven years old, she was struck by a car while walking in her neighborhood where there was no separate walkway for pedestrians in Seoul, South Korea.
Kim, who is now an adjunct research associate at Portland State University (PSU), received nerve damage in her legs and had to use a wheelchair for several days after the incident. This experience launched her interest in pedestrian safety, which eventually led to her 2024 doctoral dissertation research project: "The Central Role of Perceived Safety in Connecting Crash Risk Factors and Walking Behavior."
"That was the real starting point, my personal experience. And I'm curious whether other people really do understand the real risk around them. What are the crash risk factors around them and how are they different from individual perceived risk?" Kim said.
Her dissertation, supported by funding from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), illuminates the relationship between pedestrian crash risk factors and perceived safety, as well as the relationship between safety attitudes and walking behavior. How the interplay between these factors influences people's behavior...
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The Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans) is the Regional University Transportation Center (UTC) for Federal Region 10, housed at University of Washington (UW).
In June of 2023, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), or Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), awarded PacTrans its fourth competitive grant of $15 million over 5 years. With that award, Portland State University (PSU) joined PacTrans. The center is a mobility-focused University Transportation Center with a theme of, “developing human-centered and transformative multimodal mobility solutions for an equitable Pacific Northwest.”
Each year, PacTrans provides PSU with $150,000 to fund “small research projects.” Those projects are selected through a competitive, peer-review process. The Year 2 Request for Proposals (PDF) describes the process for PSU researchers to submit proposals for these funds. PSU plans to award no more than three projects. Therefore, individual project requests should range from $30,000 to $70,000.
Abstracts are due August 8, with full...
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Jennifer Dill, director of Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC), has been named the inaugural editor-in-chief of the Transportation Research Record (TRR). The TRR—the flagship journal of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Transportation Research Board (TRB)—is one of the most cited and prolific transportation journals in the world, offering wide coverage of transportation-related topics.
While maintaining her current role as the director of TREC, Dill will begin her duties at TRR on July 15, collaborating with the TRR team and TRB volunteers to enhance the journal’s role in improving the nation's transportation system through high-quality research.
"The Transportation Research Record and TRB have played key roles in my scholarly and professional career. My very first peer-reviewed journal article was published in TRR based on research I did as an undergraduate student with my mentor, Dr. Dan Sperling. That opportunity opened my eyes to the possibility of being a researcher and professor," Dill said.
Prior to entering academia, Dill worked as an environmental and transportation planner at the federal and regional levels. When she first...
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You probably don’t live, work, socialize, go to school, and receive health care all in the same place. To get where you need to go in your day-to-day life, you need some form of transportation to get there. But what if that transportation is unavailable? It stands to reason that not being able to get where you need to go would have detrimental effects on your well-being.
To identify transportation disadvantages in their respective cities, professors from the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Arizona, and the University of Tennessee teamed up to design and test a travel diary app called MyAmble. Travel diaries are built for recording trips taken, but they often lack the ability to capture travel disadvantage or latent travel demand. In this context, travel disadvantage refers to essential trips that people plan to take but are unable to complete for some reason, e.g., their car breaks down or they don’t have gas money. Latent travel demand refers to trips that people would take but don’t bother to plan due to transportation barriers or safety concerns. The aim of MyAmble...
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Homes, Not Offices: Researchers Recommend Changes to Transit Station Area Development After COVID-19
A new report offers lessons for post-pandemic transit policy and planning. Notably, it calls for planners to downplay the role of offices in transit station areas and increase the opportunity for people to live in them. Researchers Arthur C. Nelson and Robert Hibberd published "Transit Station Area Development and Demographic Outcomes (PDF)," updating their longitudinal analysis of the impacts of development near transit stations.
The new report includes a foreword by U.S. Congressman Earl Blumenauer. An excerpt reads:
Read more"In this report, Arthur C. Nelson, Emeritus Professor of Urban Planning and Real Estate Development at the University of Arizona, and Robert Hibberd, a doctoral student, chronical numerous economic and demographic changes that occurred in transit station areas between the Great Recession that ended in 2009 and the pandemic that started in 2020. Through detailed analysis of 57 transit systems operating...
According to new research, transit-oriented development (TOD) can address the equity challenge of "spatial mismatch," where urban residents are isolated from relevant employment centers, and significantly improve employment access.
"Job-Worker Balance & Polycentric Transit-Oriented Development: Toward Indices and Spatio-temporal Trends," funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), examines how transit-oriented development (TOD) affects employment access and addresses urban equity challenges, particularly in the context of essential workers and the COVID-19 pandemic.
In addition to demonstrating that TOD can help mitigate spacial mismatch, the study also highlights that TOD can lower transportation costs and enhance job-worker balance by providing more accessible central locations. Additionally, higher levels of spatial density and land use mix can aid in managing pandemics by improving access to essential jobs, which often involve low-income occupations that require face-to-face interactions.
The dissertation's author, Robert Hibberd, is a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona (UA). An Eisenhower Fellow and NITC Dissertation Fellow, Hibberd devoted his doctoral research to exploring how the spatial distribution of resources and infrastructure in cities affects access to employment and essential services, ...
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Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) maintains two large, public transportation data lakes: PORTAL and BikePed Portal. The latest round of funding for PORTAL, in the amount of $1.6 million, was awarded in February 2024 and will cover PORTAL's activities through the next five years. BikePed Portal, too, recently received $100K for another year of funding, and both are the focus of some exciting innovations in transportation data.
The two centralized data repositories, unique both in their size and in the fact that they are accessible (PORTAL is freely available to the public, and BikePed Portal has limited public access as well), are supported by multiple federal, state, and regional agencies. Federal funding for PORTAL comes from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)'s Surface Transportation Block Grant (STBG) funding, suballocated by Metro’s ...
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Portland's Old Town neighborhood is getting a new skatepark, and a team of PSU transportation students were instrumental in bringing the project from idea to reality.
Given the project of activating a vacant lot on the west side of the Steel Bridge by transforming it into a community skatepark, students in the Spring 2023 bike-pedestrian planning class created a set of design options, a weighted decision matrix, and a memorandum of existing conditions for the site. They also developed performance measures to determine how best to meet the project's objectives of activating the space, creating a welcoming environment, and stimulating local business activity.
Their work provided a basis for ongoing conversations with stakeholders around the project, which ultimately resulted in a green light: Funding for the new skatepark was announced in January by Commissioner Dan Ryan, who oversees Portland Parks & Recreation. Work is slated to begin this spring on property acquisition, community engagement and design of the 35,000 square foot facility.
Read more"Getting to see this skatepark regularly...
When you think of your dream home, what do you think of? Perhaps you envision a house with enough space for your whole family to be comfortable. Maybe you’ll be close to your extended family…or maybe you won’t, depending on your personal family dynamic. It will be in a safe neighborhood, perhaps with access to amenities that promote a healthier lifestyle, like green spaces and walking trails. School, work, grocery stores, and the doctor’s office will be easy to access. The home won’t cause you financial stress. It will feel like yours.
You may not be surprised to hear that many people look for these qualities when considering a place to live. With the study “Housing Choice, Transportation Equity, and Access to Opportunities in Refugee and Immigrant Communities,” professors at the University of Texas at Arlington sought to collect qualitative data about factors and values that caused refugee and immigrant populations in Dallas County, Texas to want to move. This demographic makes up a significant part of Dallas County’s population; almost one fourth of people who live there were born outside the United States. By better understanding the needs of this population, policies could be set in place that address inequity and make the community a more welcoming, accessible place for all. The paper focuses on the roles that primary and secondary mobility play in the housing choices of immigrants and...
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The trip to and from school is made by nearly every child in Oregon every school day. Bike and walk buses, organized groups of school children, parents, and ride/walk leaders, seek to encourage biking and walking to school. A new research project at Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) will gather information on bike buses nationwide, inspired by the success of Sam Balto's bike bus initiative at Alameda Elementary School in Portland, Oregon.
Balto, a physical education teacher, catapulted into the limelight in 2022 after establishing a weekly bike bus involving over 100 students commuting to school on two wheels. Its success and popularity prompted a broader initiative to understand and promote the benefits of bike and walk buses across the United States.
Researchers John MacArthur and Nathan McNeil, along with Evan Howington, a student in the Master of Urban and...
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The 103rd annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) will be held January 7–11, 2024 in Washington, D.C., and NITC transportation faculty and researchers will be sharing their expertise at the world's largest transportation conference. The TRB annual meeting attracts thousands of transportation professionals from around the globe to address transportation policy, practice, and plans for the future.
Below are a few highlights of research being presented by transportation experts from our participating NITC-funded campuses: Portland State University (PSU), University of Oregon (UO), University of Utah (UU), University of Arizona (UA), and University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). Check out our full NITC guide for all of the sessions:
VIEW THE ONLINE GUIDE TO NITC AT TRB 2024
*Due to the evolving status of speaker attendance and TRB programming, please check your TRB schedule for the most current information in the event of changes.*
NITC Research Highlights at TRB 2024
University of Texas at Arlington
Monday, January 8 - Older Adults, Travel Options, and Barriers to Accessibility
In this lectern session, Juana Perez, Mohammad Rashidi, Jobaidul Boni and Kate Hyun of the University of Texas, Arlington...
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