National Institute for Transportation and Communities

Psychology teaches us that implicit biases—attitudes we hold on a level below consciousness, and may not even be aware of—can have a heavy influence on split-second decisions.

In a fast-paced activity like driving, with a lot of moving parts in a complex environment, we make those snap decisions all the time. There are obvious safety implications to this, particularly for the most vulnerable road users. That’s why TREC researchers are becoming more and more interested in studying implicit bias and social psychology as it relates to transportation behavior.

The latest report from the NITC program, Exploring Drivers’ Attitudes and Behaviors toward Bicyclists: The Effect of Explicit and Implicit Attitudes on Self-Reported Safety Behaviors, is a dissertation by NITC fellow Tara Goddard.

With a focus on driver-cyclist interactions, Goddard dives into the social psychology of roadway interactions and comes up with some interesting takeaways for practitioners and researchers. Before moving to Portland in 2011 to begin her Ph.D., Goddard was the bicycle/pedestrian coordinator for the City of Davis, California, and says that it’s important to understand the mechanisms at...

May was national bike month, sponsored by the League of American Bicyclists and celebrated in communities from coast to coast.

The NITC-supported ITE student chapter at the Oregon Institute of Technology helped to organize a "Bike, Walk or Run to Work" day on Friday, May 19.

Klamath County Public Health and the Blue Zones Project partnered to bring Bike to Work events to five locations around the town of Klamath Falls, Oregon, the home of Oregon Tech. 

Community members were invited to bike, walk, or run to work on May 19 and stop in at Gathering Grounds Roastery, Sky Lakes Medical Center, Mia & Pia's Pizzeria & Brewhouse, 173rd Fighter Wing, Kingsley Field, or Klamath Community College for free breakfast and refreshments.

There was also a raffle, with prize drawings at 5:.30 p.m. at Gaucho Collective.

The more participants actively commuted to work throughout the week, the more chances they had to win prizes.

Oregon Tech's ITE Student Chapter member staffed four breakfast stations across the Klamath Basin to encourage community members to consider healthier forms of transportation for their commutes.

By bringing residents, worksites, schools, restaurants, grocery stores, and government together, Blue Zones and Oregon Tech hope to inspire a community movement to improve quality of life for everyone. Bike to Work day was an indicator of that growing...

Everyday cycling for transportation can have positive, population-level health impacts. Significant deterrents to cycling remain, however, particularly for women and minorities.

Narratives of Marginalized Cyclists, a NITC project conducted by Amy Lubitow of Portland State University, explores the experiences of women and minorities biking in Portland, Oregon.

Lubitow interviewed 28 Portlanders who self-identified as a woman or as a racial/ethnic minority (or both), and based on the insights gained from their stories, came up with a set of recommended interventions for planners to mitigate the barriers they experience.

"Institutionalized racism and sexism is hard to fix. These are complicated issues that involve multiple levels of interventions, but at a basic sort of smaller scale, there are things we can do," Lubitow said.

She chose participants who own a bike and ride it at least once a month, but not more than once a week. The primary aim of the project was to collect rich, narrative data regarding obstacles to routine or utilitarian cycling for women and minorities who already see biking as a viable form of transportation, but who make relatively few bike trips.

The interviews yielded a...

A new NITC report from the University of South Florida makes it easier than ever for cities to collect useful bike data.

Cities like Portland, Oregon, Atlanta and San Francisco have started using smartphone apps to learn how people are using their bicycle infrastructure. The data can help planners decide what designs or upgrades are needed for the bicycle network.

The NITC project Rapidly Expanding Mobile Apps for Crowd-sourcing Bike Data to New Cities takes this idea a step further by creating a proof-of-concept multi-region architecture that would allow cities to share the same set of mobile apps, rather than each city launching its own.

This would significantly reduce the cost of deploying the apps.

Sean Barbeau of USF’s Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) led the team in developing the open-source software that allows existing apps to communicate with regional servers.

With it, rather than each city having to modify and deploy their own iOS or Android app, all that a city would need to do is set up a server specific to their geographic area.

Having...