This week, Portland State University’s Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) releases a new research report comparing equity-oriented programs across several U.S. bike share systems. The research finds a variety of methods in place, ranging from affordability to internal hiring practices and beyond. The report is assisted by Toole Design...
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- Download the Final Report (PDF)
- Download the Project Brief (PDF)
- Use the STAT Toolbox
- Join the DEMO WEBINAR: STAT will be demonstrated by its creators on Sept 4
With today's profusion of open data sources and real-time feeds, transit agencies have an unparalleled opportunity to leverage large amounts of data to improve transit service. Thanks to NITC researchers,...
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- Download the Final Report (PDF)
- Download the Project Brief (PDF)
- See the big picture: Read about the ongoing work
Many cities are reconsidering their reliance on ITE's Trip Generation Manual, now in its 10th edition.
Kelly Clifton, TREC researcher and associate dean for research of Portland State University's Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science, is one of the people leading the charge to identify better, more nuanced ways to anticipate transportation demand; especially person (non-car) trips. In an extended series of TREC projects, Clifton and...
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The National Institute for Transportation & Communities (NITC) research consortium, led by Portland State University, has awarded $1.035 million in total funding for ten research projects spanning five universities. This year we focused funding on micromobility, traffic, meeting the transportation needs of underserved populations and people with disabilities, and the intersection of transportation and housing.
Darshan Chauhan, Portland State University
Darshan Chauhan is a graduate research assistant in civil engineering at Portland State University. He currently serves as the treasurer of STEP (Students in Transportation Engineering and Planning), PSU's transportation student group, and generously volunteers his time at a variety of transportation-related events via PSU's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC). He will defend his masters thesis on network flow problems this year, and plans to continue on to earn his PhD. In the 2018/2019 academic year, Darshan earned a Walter H. Kramer Fellowship from Portland State University.
Tell us about yourself?
I am a second-year Masters student in the civil engineering program with a transportation focus at PSU. I have been training with Prof. Unnikrishnan here to understand, model, and tackle uncertainties in different transportation networks. Before coming to Portland, I completed my Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering at BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus, working as an undergraduate researcher in areas like fracture mechanics, optimization, and alternate cementitious materials through my junior and senior years. After completing my masters, I am continuing for my Ph.D. in transportation at PSU. Apart from school, I really enjoy...
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Our Transportation Undergraduate Research Fellowship (TURF) program is in its third year, and we're excited to introduce our 2019 cohort. The TURF program advances critical thinking and research skills under the guidance of a PSU transportation faculty mentor. This year's fellows are working on various research initiatives at TREC, including e-scooters, bicycle and pedestrian count data, multimodal trip generation, pedestrian safety and equitable transit.
TURF is funded by an education grant through our U.S. DOT funded program the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC). Students were selected through a competitive application process; we had 103 applications from 23 U.S. states and 4 countries.
The TURF fellows will spend six weeks during the summer of 2019 at Portland State University, tackling transportation engineering and planning research questions.
MEET THE 2019 TURF FELLOWS
Anaisabel Crespo - Leiva, SUNY...
Research on older adults frequently explores the notion of “aging in place”—providing older adults the opportunity to continue to live in their own homes and communities. However one’s ability to stay or leave, particularly in old age, often depends on the built environment. An accessible neighborhood that prioritizes mobility affords the ability to meet basic needs like goods, services, and social activities.
This life-space mobility is...
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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...
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The latest NITC report offers improved tools for pedestrian modeling.
Led by Kelly Clifton of Portland State University, researchers had previously created the the MoPeD pedestrian demand model as well as a pedestrian index of the environment (PIE) for forecasting pedestrian travel. The PIE index improved the sensitivity of walk trip models by incorporating contextual features of the built environment that affect walking behavior in the Portland, Oregon region. Read about Clifton's previous body of work on context-specific modeling.
Useful for academic researchers in transportation, Clifton's research provides a framework for incorporating pedestrian travel behavior forecasts into traditional four-step travel demand models.
Since the method was based on Portland, the next step was to adapt the tools for wider use. In this new report, Clifton and Jaime Orrego-Onate of...
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