Eleven students attending partner universities of the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) are receiving Eisenhower Fellowships presented by the U.S. Department of Transportation at this year's annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB). Meet this year's NITC Eisenhower Fellows:
Ashley (Ash) Avila, University of Arizona
Ash Avila is a graduate student in the Accelerated Master’s Program in Urban Planning at the University of Arizona with a focus on transportation and environmental planning. She is currently a graduate research assistant studying the effects of heat and other weather patterns on travel behavior as part of a larger ... Read more
Nathan McNeil, a Research Associate at PSU's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC), and co-authors Keith Bartholomew and Matt Ryan (University of Utah), have been selected for a Charley V. Wootan Award for their paper "Transportation Academies as Catalysts for Civic Engagement in Transportation Decision-making." They will be presented with the award in January at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB).
The paper, published in Transportation Research Record (TRR): The Journal of the Transportation Research Board, draws on findings from a project funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), with additional support from Salt Lake City Transportation Division; Wasatch Front Regional Council; Utah Department of Transportation; Utah Transit Authority; University of Utah; Salt Lake County, Regional Planning and Transportation; and the Portland Bureau of Transportation. Read more about the project: Launching the Wasatch Transportation Academy.
The article will also appear in a promotional issue of the TRR journal, physical copies of which will be available in the TRB Annual Meeting Exhibitor Hall in Washington, D.C. during the annual meeting. Stop by the TRR Journal booth for a copy.
The...
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After 17 years of service to TREC, Portland State University's Transportation Research and Education Center, associate director Hau Hagedorn is moving on to a new position as the Community Investments Manager for Oregon Metro. We will miss her as a colleague, as a model for transportation photos (here she is on the cover of our 2022 Annual Report) and as a seemingly inexhaustible source of energy and inspiration!
During her time at TREC, Hau devoted tireless efforts to improving access to transportation and mobility for people of all ages, communities, and incomes. Her perseverance and commitment have been recognized in the form of numerous accolades and awards. In 2020, she received the CUTC-ARTBA Award for Administrative Leadership from the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC) and the American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA), and the same year she was appointed ...
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Managing the entire transportation system requires an integrated understanding of all modes. While the focus of transportation system management and operations (TSMO) has been largely focused on vehicles, understanding how the transportation system can work better for bicyclists, pedestrians, and transit can help provide safe, reliable, and cost-effective transportation options to improve communities and economic vitality for people and businesses.
To encourage practical grounding of transportation from the different vulnerable road user perspectives, PSU's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) held a two-day training workshop for a cohort of around 100 Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT) staff members.
The two-day workshop, which featured classroom presentations as well as mobile tours on bike, foot, and public transportation, was held September 26-28 at Portland State University. Presentations on topics like Transportation System Management, Safety, and Innovative Transportation Operations Solutions were given by both professionals of WSDOT—including Statewide TSMO Development Engineer Pam Vasudeva, and Director of Transportation Operations Dongho Chang—as well as guest speakers including Peter Koonce of the Portland Bureau of Transportation and Jingtao Ma of Traffic Technology Services.
Learning objectives included:
Identify transportation operation practices and approaches that promote...
In 2022, one in ninety-five people in the world were forcibly uprooted from their homes, causing them to seek homes in other countries—that is, become refugees. Resettlement in a new country allows them to escape unpredictable or unsafe conditions, but it comes with its own array of challenges. Though refugees’ satisfaction in their post-resettlement environments has been studied, the role of mobility in their qualities of life remains understudied.
To fill this research gap, professors from the University of Arizona conducted a mixed-methods study with members of the refugee community Tucson, Arizona. Their goal was to understand how transportation impacts refugees’ well-being in order to develop recommendations for how cities and nonprofits can better serve this vulnerable portion of the population. The findings not only highlighted the importance of transportation to refugees and the number of barriers that prevent refugees from fully utilizing the systems in place, but also provided interesting insights into perspectives of transportation that challenge the traditional white feminist viewpoint of gender roles. They challenge the idea that the population of refugees can be generalized, and they place an emphasis on the importance of individual experiences.
To learn more about the findings, watch an...
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As a social determinant of health, transportation significantly contributes to people's well-being. Walkable, bikable, transit-oriented communities are associated with healthier populations. People in such communities are more physically active, less likely to be injured due to a crash, and less exposed to air pollution.
Because of these and other factors, researchers and practitioners have called for health indicators as one way to integrate public health concerns into transportation decision-making. However, it is unclear how indicators are actually being used and what their impact is on policy.
Research conducted by Kelly Rodgers, a National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) Dissertation Fellow, explored how health-related indicators are being used in municipal transportation plans, whether they are institutionalized into transportation agency decision-making processes, and what influence they have on administrative decision-making.
"I have for some time been working at the intersection of health and transportation, and was interested in how health could be better integrated into transportation decision making. And I have also previously done work on performance measures. And so I kind of combined those two things, to see if health-related indicators were a way of getting transportation agencies to consider health in transportation planning," Rodgers said.
THE RESEARCH
Rodgers conducted case...
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Living in a car-centric society has its downsides, and many transportation professionals are working to encourage non-car travel. To do so, researchers must determine what motivates people to use other forms of transportation besides driving as well as what discourages them. The COVID-19 pandemic lowered the amount of car driving because of stay-at-home orders and the shift to remote work. Researchers from the University of Oregon saw this as the perfect opportunity to work on identifying how travel behaviors changed as a result. Other objectives of the project were to evaluate the prevalence of desire to expand travel options in the future, and to explore any new, post-COVID support for policies that encourage multimodal travel.
This project builds on the 2020 paper, “Moving Eugene Sustainably After COVID-19,” in which the researchers, Yizhao Yang and Rebecca Lewis, found that factors dissuading folks in the Eugene-Springfield region of Oregon from biking or walking pre-pandemic mattered less during the pandemic. For the NITC project, the researchers followed up with the previous interviewees as well as new participants in the Eugene-Springfield area to document how their opinions about transportation have changed since the beginning of 2020. The research refers to three distinct periods of time: Before COVID Emergency Period (before March 8, 2020, when...
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How can emerging data sources most effectively be integrated with traditional sources? A new article in the July 2023 issue of Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board reports that rather than replacing conventional bike data sources and count programs, old “small” data sources will likely be very important for big data sources like Strava and StreetLight to achieve their potential for predicting annual average daily bicycle traffic (AADBT).
The article, "Evaluating the Potential of Crowdsourced Data to Estimate Network-Wide Bicycle Volumes," was authored by TREC researchers Joe Broach, Sirisha Kothuri and Nathan McNeil of Portland State University along with Md Mintu Miah, Kate Hyun and Stephen Mattingly of the University of Texas at Arlington, Krista Nordback of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Frank Proulx of Frank Proulx Consulting, LLC.
Transportation agencies have invested heavily in count infrastructure and models to estimate motor vehicle volumes through networks. Efforts to develop network wide bicycle volume estimates have been hampered by lack of bicycle counters and limited other data sources from which to draw volume estimates. Until recently, most data on bicycle activity came from national or regional household travel surveys, along with observed counts of cyclists—...
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Passenger aviation is a driver of the US economy, contributing over 4% to US GDP every year. While most large metropolitan areas in the United States have easy access to global air transportation networks through major hub airports, residents of small, remote communities may struggle to access such opportunities. To improve access for such communities, Congress established Essential Air Service (EAS), which provides subsidies to airlines to provide service from certain remote communities to larger hubs. While the costs of EAS have been well studied, little to no research has studied the benefits of EAS.
Research conducted by Austin Drukker, a National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) Dissertation Fellow, sought to quantify the benefits of EAS to remote communities in order to understand whether EAS accomplished its goal of connecting these communities to the national air transportation network, or whether Congress should consider other policies to meet this objective.
THE RESEARCH
The researcher posed three main questions:
- How much do remote communities value Essential Air Service?
- How does the value of Essential Air Service compare with its costs?
- Are there...
How do you get from point A to point B? Maybe you bike or take public transit to get to work or school. Perhaps you drive to places that may be farther away, like medical appointments or friends’ houses. Imagine that you didn’t have access to many transportation options—maybe you were unable to drive a car, or the nearest bus stop was several miles away. This is the reality for many folks as they grow older, and their loved ones must then help them get where they need to go.
Older immigrants often live in low-density urban environments, or places where they need to use an automobile of some sort and have limited access to public transportation (like the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex). This could potentially add stress to both the older folks and the private ride providers who help with transportation. The providers may be at risk for the burden and stress of caregiving, and the older immigrants may lack transportation to important social or health opportunities if the providers they rely on are not available.
Researchers at the University of Texas, Arlington and the University of Connecticut teamed up to fill a gap in the knowledge of the elderly Vietnamese immigrant population in DFW. They sought to learn about the transportation behaviors not only of the Vietnamese adults but also of their ride providers. By increasing knowledge of the transportation...
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