National Institute for Transportation and Communities

Automobile traffic congestion in urban areas comes with significant economic and social costs for everyone. According to the 2015 Urban Mobility Report, the total additional cost of congestion was $160 billion. As more people move to metropolitan areas, the problems only intensify. The latest NITC report offers a new approach to urban traffic signal control based on network consensus control theory which is computationally efficient, responsive to local congestion, and at the same time has the potential for congestion management at the network level.

Traffic signals represent a significant bottleneck. As cars queue up at a stoplight, then gradually move again once the...

For the second year in a row, we're opening up an exciting opportunity for undergraduate students interested in transportation: Spend a summer at Portland State University to learn more about the world of research in transportation through our Transportation Undergraduate Research Fellowship (TURF) program. This program is open to current undergraduate students from any university who are interested in learning more about transportation engineering or planning research. 

Hosted at PSU, selected students will be paired with a PSU faculty mentor (from either the College of Urban and Public Affairs or the Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science). The student will carry out research on a transportation project for ten weeks at 40 hours per week. TURF Fellows are provided a $7,500 stipend, but must find and fund their own lodging.

Decisions will be made by March 29, 2019. Contact us at asktrec@pdx.edu with any questions.

APPLY FOR TURF 2019 (by Feb 15th)

"Conducting...

University Transportation Center (UTC) Spotlight

In recent decades, cities have become increasingly motivated to invest in infrastructure that supports multimodal options like walking, biking and public transit. Trip generation, the first step in conventional four-step forecasting models, is a central figure in determining how those investments are made.

However, when considering pedestrian and bicycling travel, the current practice is usually to either leave those trips out of the model altogether, or to simply present them as a mode choice option that is not analyzed further. In short, they’re car-centric.

Without reliable trip generation rates for anyone but drivers, an accurate transportation impact is difficult to predict. Certain land uses will draw far more walkers, cyclists and transit riders than drivers. Cities lack enough information to strategically plan for multimodal...

Travis Glick, Portland State University

Travis Glick is a PhD student, graduate teaching and research assistant in civil & environmental engineering at Portland State University. He served for two years as president of Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning (STEP), Portland State University's transportation student group. Travis is a 2018 NITC student scholar and two-time Eisenhower fellow, and will be presenting research on bus dwell times, bus-bike conflicts and transit modeling at the 2019 annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB).

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