Traffic congestion on urban roadways can influence operating costs and cause travel delays.
Portland State University master’s students Nicholas Stoll and Travis Glick will present a paper introducing solutions for locating the sources of congestion at the 2016 annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board.
With their faculty advisor, Miguel Figliozzi, Stoll and Glick looked into using bus GPS data to identify congestion hot spots.
By using high-resolution GPS data to visualize trends in bus behavior and movement, the researchers were able to examine the sources of delay on urban arterials.
These visualizations, which can be in the form of heat maps or speed plots like the one shown here on the right (an application of numerical method applied to a 2,000 ft segment of SE Powell), can be used by transportation agencies to identify locations where improvements are needed. For example, adding a queue jump lane at a congested intersection can improve flow.
The researchers used fine-grained bus data provided by TriMet to create the visualizations. Buses have been used as probes to estimate travel times before, but with...
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States can reduce greenhouse gas emissions with a broad range of approaches, but none will have much luck without continued support from leaders and the public, according to NITC program research from the University of Oregon. In a conference paper for the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C., a team led by Rebecca Lewis took a close look at the efforts West Coast states have made to reduce emissions from the transportation.
Cutting transportation emissions depends on three variables: vehicle efficiency, fuel carbon content and vehicle miles traveled, or VMT. The paper focuses on the last leg: cutting driving. While more efficient automobiles and alternative fuels have come on the market in recent years, a growing population and longer commutes can wipe out any emissions gains from shifts in fuel economy and fuel type.
Washington, Oregon and California have all passed statutes to cut statewide greenhouse gases below 1990 levels by 2020. The approaches vary in their targets, plans and strategies.
Lewis and her team present the research in a poster session Tuesday, Jan. 12 at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in...
Planners and policymakers make decisions that shape neighborhoods based on the best data they have. Unfortunately, when it comes to predicting where people want to live, those data give an incomplete or inaccurate picture.
Behavioral models often rely on basic socioeconomic data such as household size, income and age. But deciding where to live depends on attitudes toward a tangled mix of transportation, urban form and housing characteristics. A NITC project helped untangle these decisions by creating a framework to understand neighborhood preference.
Steven Gehrke presents some of this project’s research findings Wednesday, Jan. 13 at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C.
A team led by Kelly Clifton, with Gehrke and Kristina Currans, designed survey techniques that give a clearer picture of the decision-making process. Their work is detailed in the NITC report “Understanding Market Segments for Current and Future Residential Location and Travel Choices.”
Gehrke’s TRB paper details one piece of that research project. The research team presented respondents a series of images...
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Feature stories
- Research helps untangle how we decide where to live
- Lack of sustained support, increased driving threaten state greenhouse gas efforts
- GPS data can identify congestion hot spots
- BRT drives employment in manufacturing sectors
- Workshop demystifies U.S. DOT public access plan
- ...
The NITC program has selected a dissertation fellow for the fall 2015 round of dissertation funding.
Tara Goddard, a Portland State University Ph.D. candidate, will be awarded a $15,000 fellowship to support her doctoral dissertation research.
Goddard's dissertation explores drivers' behaviors toward bicyclists in roadway interactions.
Bicyclists in the United States are twelve times more likely than car occupants to be killed in a traffic crash with a car. Existing research into crash causation has focused on physical factors such as vehicle speed and intersection type, with little of it delving into psychological and cultural variables.
Goddard is researching drivers' attitudes toward bicyclists, by means of an online survey, in an effort to understand how those attidutes may predict behaviors. She hopes to reveal some of the underlying causes of bicycle and motor vehicle collisions.
Her research aims to advance community livability and safety goals.
Stay tuned for more on this research as it unfolds, or sign up for our mailing list and choose “Research Findings” in order to receive NITC reports as they are published.
Two students from the Oregon Institute of Technology have been awarded 2015 WTS Portland Chapter Scholarships.
Miranda Barrus and Danit Hubbell were named as the recipients of these highly competitive scholarships, open to applications from students in universities throughout Oregon and Washington.
Barrus, a co-terminal graduate student expecting to graduate (BS/MS) Civil Engineering in June 2016, won the 2015 WTS Portland Gail Achterman Leadership Graduate Scholarship. Barrus was the recipient of a different WTS scholarship last year.
Hubbell is a senior undergraduate, expecting to graduate (BS) Civil Engineering in March 2016. She is the winnter of the 2015 WTS Portland Sharon D. Banks Memorial Undergraduate Scholarship. Hubbell also recently received a 2015 Oregon Tech Douglas P. Daniels/Coral Sales Company Scholarship.
Both Barrus and Hubbell have a keen interest in transportation engineering. They have each completed multiple transportation-related internships through CECOP and are active members of Oregon Tech's Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Student Chapter. Hubbell is the 2015-16 Chapter President, while Barrus is the Vice-President and Field Trip Coordinator.
Founded in 1977, Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) is an international...
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Oregon Tech students Danit Hubbell and Jake Murray have been awarded the 2015 Oregon Tech Douglas P. Daniels/Coral Sales Company Scholarships.
Hubbell is a senior undergraduate expecting to graduate with a B.S. in March 2016. She is currently the President of the OIT ITE Student Chapter and has held transportation-related internships with The City of Eugene and Kiewit Infrastructure Engineers.
Murray is a co-terminal graduate student expecting to graduate with a B.S. and an M.S. in June 2016. He has been a member of the OIT Traffic Bowl team at two 2015 events (Las Vegas and Portland) and has spent summers interning with Oregon DOT Region 4.
Both Hubbell and Murray have previously been awarded NITC academic and travel scholarships. They will be also be traveling to the 2016 TRB Annual Meeting in Washington, DC with the financial support of NITC and the ITE Student Chapter.
The Douglas P. Daniels Scholarship fund was established to help support transportation engineering students at universities in the Pacific Northwest. Since its inception in 1987, the fund has recognized nearly 700 recipients. Coral Sales Scholars excel in both leadership and interpersonal communications. These distinguished achievers are destined to become front runners in the transportation industry.
The formal award of these prestigious scholarships took place December 2, 2015 at a...
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A new NITC project has developed a robust pedestrian demand estimation tool, the first of its kind in the country.
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See the research here: Development of a Pedestrian Demand Estimation Tool
Using the tool, planners can predict pedestrian trips with spatial acuity.
The research was completed in partnership with Oregon Metro, and will allow Metro to allocate infrastructure based on pedestrian demand in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area.
In a previous project completed last year as part of the same partnership, the lead investigator, Kelly Clifton, developed a way to collect data about the pedestrian environment on a small, neighborhood scale that made sense for walk trips. For more about how that works, click here to read our news coverage of that project.
Following the initial project, the next step was to take that micro-level pedestrian data and use it to predict destination choice. For every walk trip generated by the model in the first project, this tool matches it to a likely destination based on traveler characteristics and environmental attributes.
Patrick Singleton, a graduate student researcher at Portland...
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Patrick Singleton, a Portland State University doctoral candidate in the school of Civil & Environmental Engineering, has been selected as the 2015 NITC university transportation center student of the year.
To be nominated for this award, which includes a $1000 stipend and also covers the recipient’s attendance to the Transportation Research Board (TRB)’s annual meeting, graduate students must demonstrate technical merit and research accomplishments, as well as outstanding academic performance, professionalism and leadership.
The award comes at the close of an auspicious year for Singleton. In the spring of 2015 he attended the Eno Leadership Development Conference as an Eno fellow. He was also one of four civil and environmental engineering students from PSU to be awarded the Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship in 2014, and at last year’s TRB annual meeting, he was selected as TRB’s top-ranked Eisenhower Fellow.
Singleton studies active travel behavior and travel demand. His postgraduate research at PSU has tackled statistical analysis of the complex decision-making processes surrounding walking and bicycling.
Together with his advisor,...
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Seven Oregon Tech students attended a sustainable pavement conference in Portland thanks to NITC program funding. The 2015 Asphalt Sustainability Conference West highlighted innovations in technologies and practices.
Danit Hubbell, Oregon Tech’s ITE student chapter president, said she and the other students who made the trip last month are all transportation focused, though they have varying degrees of interest in asphalt. The conference featured a good mix of topics, she said.
The term “sustainability” can vary based on context, and that was reflected in the conference sessions, Hubbell said. “One presenter talked about it as the asphalt itself and the materials it’s made out of. For others, it was the transportation and the longevity.
“I think it encompasses both of those,” she said.
Asphalt paving has come a long way in the last few years, Hubbell said, with sustainability driving much of the changes. Oregon Tech has stayed on top of those innovations, she said, as all civil engineering students must complete a infrastructure sustainability course.
The conference seemed to draw more transportation practitioners than students, Hubbell said, which was part of its appeal. The Oregon Tech students relished the opportunity to browse the exhibitors’ tables and talk with professionals from various organizations.
Hubbell, who graduates next March, already has a job lined up. She’ll join Kiewit Infrastructure...