Knowing how many travelers use a transportation system is important for a number of reasons. Engineers and planners need to be able to estimate travel demand, and to do so they typically count the vehicles. Annual average daily traffic (AADT) counts have been collected for decades in the United States.
In recent years the demand has increased for non-motorized counts. For a...
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Despite the many connections between transportation and public health, many agencies tasked with long-range transportation planning have yet to completely consider effects on health, a Portland State University research team found. The research will be presented at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C. Jan. 11-15.
Patrick Singleton, a Portland State graduate student researcher, will present the paper “Incorporating public health in U.S. long-range metropolitan transportation planning: A review of guidance statements and performance measures,” during a poster session Tuesday. The paper grew out of concepts developed in a Portland State course on transportation and health taught by Prof. Kelly Clifton, who is a coauthor on the paper.
Individually, transportation and public health each have a wealth of research. That research doesn’t always cross over, Singleton said.
“The integration of these disciplines is in its infancy,” he said.
If transportation planning agencies were to fully consider transportation and health connections, those considerations would show up in their long-term plans, the research team reasoned. Performance measures would point to the potential effects of a health focus.
The researchers focused...
“Transportation Cost Index: A Comprehensive Performance Measure for Transportation and Land Use Systems and its Application in OR, FL, and UT” is a Portland State University research project that will be presented at the 2015 annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board.
Portland State University researchers Liming Wang and Jenny Liu are developing a comprehensive performance measure that enables planners and the public to evaluate the performance of transportation and land use systems over time and across geographic areas.
Transportation engineers have a long history of using performance measures such as the Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) to evaluate the operation of the transportation system. Traditionally, such measures heavily focus on the traffic condition, especially for drivers.
Since the last decade, especially with the...
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A NITC Small Starts project has taken big steps toward connecting transit users with real-time transportation information about their communities.
The “Street Portals” project, headed by researchers Jason Germany and Philip Speranza of the University of Oregon, is reinventing transit kiosks – specifically bike share kiosks – and how users interact with them in public spaces.
Germany, an assistant professor of product design in UO's school of architecture and allied arts, has a background in designing consumer products and interfaces. Collaboration with Speranza, a practicing architect who was doing research in bottom-up urban design, led to the development of a test bed for interactive kiosks that could reshape the future of urban computing in several important ways.
Typical bike share stations have a kiosk with a touch screen interface that lets the user check out and return bicycles.
The NITC researchers are interested in creating a much richer experience that includes route planning assistance, personalized activity recommendations, and a sensitive interactive display.
The first step was to create a test bed: a sample kiosk built specifically for the purpose of testing...
Read moreThree students at NITC member universities have been awarded scholarships from the Portland, Oregon chapter of WTS.
Miranda Barrus, a civil engineering student at the Oregon Institute of Technology, is the 2014 recipient of the Sharon D. Banks Undergraduate Scholarship. The scholarship honors Sharon D. Banks, chief executive officer of AC Transit in Alameda-Contra Costa County, California, who led the agency in a pioneering effort to introduce cultural and organizational changes aimed at motivating the public transit work force.
Barrus serves as vice president of Oregon Tech’s student chapter of ITE, the Institute of Transportation Engineers. She also won a scholarship for the 2014-2015 school year from the Structural Engineers Association of Oregon Scholarship Foundation. She was selected for her leadership, participation in activities, and outstanding performance in engineering.
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Portland State University has earned a reputation for innovative transportation programs that span multiple disciplines, all in service of livable communities. That expertise is now available in a single place through the newly renamed TREC, Portland State’s transportation research and education center.
Growing out of OTREC, TREC is the steward of Portland State’s participation in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s University Transportation Centers program. The program has awarded Portland State more than $30 million since 2006, with a nonfederal match requirement amplifying the effect of the federal investment and touching more community partners.
The new website, trec.pdx.edu, lets visitors search for transportation research and researchers across campus by topic or browse by research area.
With leadership from Rep. Peter DeFazio, OTREC was founded in 2006 as a four-campus consortium and expanded into a broader transportation center. The original OTREC grant ran until 2014, funding 237 research, education and technology transfer projects. In addition to carrying on this legacy, TREC also:
- Builds on the Center for Transportation Studies, established in 1966. The longstanding ...
The Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI) is teaming up with Alta Planning + Design to offer a firsthand, on-the-ground training opportunity at the end of October.
They will teach a trail design course at Portland State University, with field tours of some of Portland's biggest trail challenges and best solutions.
Course instructors are Alta associates Robin Wilcox, George Hudson, and Karen Vitkay. They will share their experience and provide examples from some of the best trails around the country.
Multi-use trails, not accessible by car but meant to be shared by pedestrians, cyclists and the occasional leashed dog, are pleasant routes by almost anyone’s standards. Often winding through wooded areas or along waterways, insulated from the noise of traffic and offering contact with nature, they present an attractive alternative to cyclists who are not as comfortable riding on busy streets.
While any segment of trail can offer a pleasant stroll, the true beauty of shared-use trails lies in being able to use them: as an alternate, off-street means of travel, a route to school or a way to get to work in the morning. A widespread switch from driving on streets to...
Read moreThe National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) invites proposals for the Fall 2014 Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowships. This grant is part of the University Transportation Center (UTC) program funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT), and is a partnership between Portland State University (PSU), the University of Oregon (UO), the Oregon Institute of Technology (Oregon Tech), and the University of Utah (UU). The mission of the UTC program is to advance U.S. technology and expertise in the many disciplines comprising transportation through the mechanisms of education, research, and technology transfer at university-based centers. See utc.dot.gov for more information.
Fellowships up to $15,000 will be awarded to cover expenses for the recipient while working on their dissertation. A Spring 2015 NITC Dissertation RFP will be released in January with applications due in April 2015.
NITC is focused on contributing to transportation projects that support innovations in: livability, incorporating safety and environmental sustainability
ELIGIBILITY
Students must be a US Citizen and have advanced to candidacy for the Ph.D. degree prior to the application deadline. NITC fellowships are open to students currently enrolled in a transportation-related doctoral program at Portland State University (PSU), University of Oregon (UO), Oregon Institute of Technology (Oregon Tech),...
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With his 2011 book, “Human Transit,” consultant Jarrett Walker provided planners and community members with a new way to think about the choices transit planning requires. Since that time, Walker has focused on what transit actually delivers. He calls this concept “abundant access”: how much of your city is available to you in a short amount of time.
Walker will delve into this topic Monday, Sept. 15 as the keynote speaker at the Oregon Transportation Summit. Online registration for the summit closes Wednesday night.
“Abundant access is an interesting way to think about transit and something that brings it into the personal frame of liberty that is missing from most analysis of urban outcomes,” Walker said. “How we talk about sensations of freedom, so that we don’t just sound like bureaucrats who know what’s good for everyone.”
Urbanist leaders go astray, Walker said, when they put other goals ahead of the liberty and opportunity that useful transit provides. That could mean catering to developers or creating a symbolic transit system that is fun to ride but doesn’t serve regular transit users well.
Walker calls the New Urbanist conceit of...
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