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
... Read more
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...
Read more
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...
Read more
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...
Read more
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...
Read more
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...
Read more
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...
Read more
The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) is soliciting proposals for our two 2018 Pooled Fund projects:
Exploring Data Fusion Techniques to Derive Bicycle Volumes on a NetworkThis project will address the need of cities and municipalities to combine bicycle data from different sources (such as manual counts, automatic counts, and crowd-sourced data from apps such as Strava) to assess an accurate accounting of bicycle traffic on a network. Current work on data fusion techniques is limited and additional research is needed to fully understand the choice of weighting techniques, inclusion of spatial vs. temporal variation in the...
Read more
This course is being offered again April 3–10, 2019. Learn more and register here.
"Scientific Computing for Planners, Engineers, and Scientists," our data science course for transportation professionals, has completed its second year and continues to help planners and engineers improve their data processing workflows.
Taking an ocean of numbers and converting it into compelling infographics, charts and narratives that communicate results is a key part of the transportation profession, and a daunting challenge. That's why we created this week-long data science course. It's also why we're offering a one-day workshop that focuses specifically on transportation...
Read more
Regular assessment of public transit performance is essential. With limited funding and growing public needs, performance evaluation helps identify areas for improvement. But what, exactly, is the desired improvement that transit agencies seek?
If the answer is operational efficiency, then agencies have a clear goal: to achieve the highest ridership possible with the lowest operational costs.
If the answer is access equity, then again a clear goal emerges: to extend transit to neighborhoods with high concentrations of low-income residents and minorities, and to evaluate proposed route changes through the lens of supplying much-needed services.
The real answer, of course, is both. Historically, research has examined...
Read more