The third and final phase of our bike share equity research project has been published, with new findings from a survey of bike share users.
Riders targeted for equity-focused outreach efforts—lower-income individuals and people of color—were most likely to cite cost savings or discounted membership as reasons why they joined, while higher-income and white users were more likely to cite the convenience of using bike share. Lower-income riders were also more...
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The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) program has released its 2018 general research request for proposals. Faculty at NITC's partner universities* are invited to submit abstracts by April 2, 2018.
Through funding provided by the U.S. DOT, we will award at least $1 million under our general research grant in 2018 for projects that support NITC’s theme: improving mobility of people and goods to build strong communities. Our theme includes a few key topics:
- Increasing access to opportunities
- Improving multi-modal planning and shared use of infrastructure
- Advancing innovation and smart cities
- Developing data, models, and tools
Research projects must focus on transportation, with additional consideration given to projects that emphasize equity and diversity in their research and partnerships. We’re seeking projects that demonstrate a strong potential to move transportation research into practice, shape national and international conversations, and respond to the needs of practitioners and policymakers.
Priority is given to projects that are collaborative, multidisciplinary, multi-campus, and support the development of untenured-tenure-track transportation faculty.
Key Dates
- Abstracts due: April 2...
Every year NITC offers Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowships which cover expenses for the recipient while working on a dissertation consistent with NITC's theme of improving the mobility of people and goods to build strong communities.
Alexander Lee, a Graduate Research Assistant in Systems and Industrial Engineering at University of Arizona, is our 2017 NITC dissertation fellow has been funded to investigate his study on Using Time-Series Analysis to Precisely Identify and Rank Road Hotspots.
Over the past decades, many ranking methods have been proposed for "road hotspots". However, results vary from method to method, and one of the issues behind ranking is the element of subjectivity. One approach to resolve these issues is the use of combined models. One of the combined models is the Enhanced Empirical Bayesian (EB) method that incorporates the use of the similarity measure based on the Proportion Discordance Ratio (PDR). This model is developed to assess and objectively quantify similarity among road segments based on crash patterns, each of which contains a unique combination of selected crash-related features.
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A NITC education grant funded a new course for planners, engineers, scientists and students to help improve their data processing workflow.
Liming Wang, an assistant professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning at Portland State University, is on a mission to simplify data processing. A NITC education grant supported his efforts to develop a new course: Introduction to Data Science (Aug 6 - 10, 2018). The course is designed to help students and professionals to improve their workflow for data-intensive research. The course covers how to collect data, clean them up, visualize, explore, model and eventually compile the data with findings in a report.
"I've pretty...
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Alex Bigazzi, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering and Community and Regional Planning, University of British Columbia
Alex Bigazzi, a former Post-Doctoral NITC researcher and student, received his Ph.D. in civil engineering from Portland State University in 2014. Learn more about Alex:
NITC Researcher Profile | LinkedIn | UCB Faculty Profile
Read an article on his recent research on congestion pricing
Tell us about yourself:
My name is Alex Bigazzi and I am an assistant professor, joint-appointed in transportation engineering and planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. My main research areas are transportation emissions and air quality and active travel.
Why did you decide to attend Portland State University?
The original decision was driven almost entirely by location. I was living in Portland, decided to go back to school for a second...
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This page serves as a homebase for our coverage of the 2018 Transportation Research Board (TRB) annual conference. Check back here for ongoing updates, as well as our Twitter and Facebook.
- NITC GUIDE TO TRB (print-friendly PDF): our printable schedule of where all of our NITC researchers will be presenting at lectures, poster sessions, and workshops
- NITC RECEPTION AT TRB: Join us for transportation bingo, co-hosted with TransitCenter, on Monday, January 8th (7–10:30pm) nearby at Fado Irish Pub
- NITC STUDENT AWARD AT CUTC BANQUET: We’ll be celebrating our 2017 NITC “Student of the Year”, Jordan Preston of Oregon Tech at the annual CUTC Banquet. She has been working as a graduate research assistant...
Jordan Preston, Oregon Institute of Technology (Oregon Tech)
Oregon Tech Student Profile | LinkedIn
An Update On Jordan at TRB:
NITC Student of the Year Jordan Preston attended TRB's annual meeting in 2018, and we had a conversation with her about the experience. Here are a few of her thoughts.
Do you have a funny story/enjoyable experience from TRB 2018 to share?
One of the highlights of my TRB experience was renting bikes with the rest of the Oregon Tech attendees and using the (awesome!) separated bike lanes to see a bit of Washington D.C. at night. Not only was I interested in actual bike lanes due to my various research projects, it was also just a great time with the professors and students to have a bit of fun!
At TRB 2018, which session(s) stood out/stuck with you the most?
I particularly enjoyed the poster sessions about bicycling, with content ranging from bike share usage to facility construction to parking shortages. Not only did I end up with an extensive list of articles and projects with more information than I can possibly sort through, it was also an excellent...
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In the last decade there has been a national trend toward projects that involve roadway space reallocation across modes. "Road Diets," in which one or more travel lanes are removed to make space for wider and safer bicycle and pedestrian space, is a common type of roadway reallocation.
A new NITC report by Miguel Figliozzi and Travis Glick of Portland State University offers a new methodology for doing before-and-after studies of these projects using high-resolution transit data. The data used in this project was supplied by TriMet, the transit provider for the Portland, Oregon metropolitan region.
Typically, before-and-after studies of roadway changes have used data on vehicle speeds to determine effects of change, without considering transit. By using datasets from transit providers, researchers can measure transit and also general traffic speed, so the data serve both purposes.
"This is a new methodology; something that no one...
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New laws in California and Oregon—California’s Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act (SB 375) and the Oregon Sustainable Transportation Initiative (SB 1059)—have made them the first states in the nation to try and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions using the transportation planning process.
A new NITC report coauthored by Keith Bartholomew and David Proffitt of the University of Utah evaluates how these pioneering laws have changed local planning processes in each state. Under these laws, metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) must include climate goals in their regional transportation plans; coordinating land use and transportation infrastructure in a way that aims at reducing per capita GHG emissions.
"The MPOs have to show how, in the future, they could accomodate population growth, new housing and new...
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TREC is searching for a transportation data program manager to administer our Portal Program.
The Portal Program Administrator will work on a variety of transportation data projects that require data synthesis, analysis, presentation and visualization.
This individual will work closely with the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC), PORTAL (the Portland Region transportation data archive), and bike-ped data to develop requirements and recommendations on improving the usability of the Portland regional transportation, and bicycle and pedestrian data to help meet the needs of transportation agency end-users.
The PORTAL transportation data archive contains freeway (speed, count, travel time), arterial (travel time, traffic signal, bicycle count, pedestrian push button), transit, incident, weigh-in-motion and weather data. The BikePed Portal is the national archive for bicycle and pedestrian count data.
For more information and to apply, visit the Portland State University job posting or view the full...
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