OTREC welcomes transportation professionals from China

Oct 12, 2010

On Monday, OTREC faculty and students met with transportation scholars and practitioners from China. Professor Haixiao Pan from Tongji University in Shanghai presented his research on transit-oriented development titled "From TOD to 5D in a Fast Growth City with High Density." His look at Chinese cities indicates that levels of walking and bicycling are key to reducing vehicle miles traveled, perhaps even more so than transit use.

Liyuan Gong, deputy director of the Jinan Public Transport Development Institute, and Wenhong Wang, department head of the Beijing Urban Engineering Design and Research Institute Co., gave overviews of bus rapid transit systems in several Chinese cities.

Professor Connie Ozawa, director of the School of Urban Studies and Planning, welcomed the group to Portland State University. OTREC Director Jennifer Dill presented her research on travel behavior of TOD residents and John Gliebe, OTREC researcher and urban studies assistant professor, presented on dynamic travel demand modeling. Arlie Adkins, an urban studies doctoral student, presented "Getting the Parking Right for Suburban TODs."

The forum gave students and faculty opportunities to exchange ideas about integrating transportation and land use in China and the United States. In both countries, some transit-oriented developments have fallen short of transit-use goals for similar reasons, such as convenience and time. Reliability of transit service often plays a greater role...

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Portland is a livable city

Apr 07, 2010

Streetcar_people_alphabet National Geographic recently described Portland as the City that “…gets almost everything right; it’s friendly, sustainable, accessible, and maybe a model for America’s future” (Cover story, Dec. 2009). Portland has a shared vision of a livable city, articulated in many different ways. It is seen in neighborhood self-help projects, big municipal investments, enlightened developers that build infill projects consistent with city plans, and the highest recycling participation rate in the country.  Taken together Portland is a city that is environmentally responsible, and conscious of both street level and of global impact of doing things right.

 

Early History

Arguably, Portland’s first act of ‘building green’ was in 1892, when it built a reservoir network to protect and preserve the sole source of its drinking water, the pristine . Today, this 102-square mile conservation zone provides ample fresh water to a region of half million people

Fast forward almost 100 years and the same ethic motivated Portlanders to reject a Robert Moses-style highway plan...

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Rick Willson on Transit Oriented Development 2.0

Feb 14, 2010

As a part of OTREC’s visiting scholars program, Professor Rick Willson from Cal Poly Pomona presented on the the next generation of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) on February 12.† In a nutshell, TOD is “the intersection of good transit planning and good development planning.”† The initial implementation of TOD in California focused on vertical mixed development, fixed rail and property within a quarter mile.† It was a good step in the right direction of creating more livable and sustainable communities.† However, it had some shortcomings such as using cheap right of way, dispersed origin-destination, and counter incentives. New legislation in California and other states focused on vehicle-miles traveled greenhouse gas emissions reduction provides an opportunity to update TOD to use the lessons learned and improve on some shortcomings.† If you missed Prof. Willson’s recent seminar, you can view the streaming video and access presentation online. (Image Credit: Rick Willson)

Transportation Health Equity Seminar

Jan 27, 2010

On January 28th, OTREC co-hosted a brown bag seminar on The Impacts and Opportunities for Building Healthy, Equitable Communities.† Shireen Malekafzali, PolicyLink, was the guest speaker of the seminar. She discussed the impacts of transportation on health, the challenges with existing policy,and the opportunities for influencing new policy with transportation authorization on the federal agenda.††Some of the recommendations for policy changes†that better consider the†impact of health equity include prioritizing and encouraging investments in public transprtation, pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure, and transit-oriented development.† The Transportation Prescription: Bold New Ideas for Transportation Reform in America, a publication produced by PolicyLink and Prevention Instituted further explores the link between transportation, health and equity.† The seminar was well-attended, with a standing room only crowd of folks that†represented public, private, non-profit, and university partners in both health and transportation fields. The seminar followed on the heels of the on the recent publication of the book, Healthy, Equitable Transportation Policy: Recommendations and...

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Transit-Oriented Development: Findings from Recent Research

View slides from Jennifer Dill's presentation

The video begins at 6:57.

Light Rail and the American City: the State-of-the-Practice for TOD

The video begins at 0:55.

Webinar: Transit-Oriented Development and Equity in Latino Neighborhoods: A Comparative Case Study of Macarthur Park (Los Angeles) and Fruitvale (Oakland)

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Watch full webinar video

View presentation slides in English

View presentation slides in Spanish

Transit-oriented development (TOD) projects in low-income neighborhoods have the potential to provide needed transportation access to a segment of the population that stands to benefit significantly from these large-scale transit infrastructure projects. This research project reveals that large-scale TOD projects have the potential of leading to neighborhood revitalization and equitable outcomes in low-income Latino communities. But these positive outcomes depend on both the process and context of these particular neighborhoods, and how transportation planners incorporate the various forms of political, financial and cultural capital that exist in these communities into the planning and implementation process of TOD projects. This comparative case study analyzed the Fruitvale Transit Village in Oakland and the MacArthur Park METRO TOD in Los Angeles. We...

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Realistic or Utopian? Coordinating Transit and Land Use to Achieve Equitable Transit-Oriented Development

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Realistic or Utopian? Coordinating Transit and Land Use to Achieve Equitable TOD


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Webinar: The Association Between Light Rail Transit, Streetcars and Bus Rapid Transit on Jobs, People and Rents

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If you would like to receive continuing education credits such as PDH or CM, please make sure to complete this evaluation form once you've watched the entire video so that we have a record of your attendance.

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Empty Spaces webinar confronts parking at transit-oriented developments

Smart Growth America hosted a webinar Jan. 31 on NITC research finding that standard guidelines lead to a drastic oversupply of parking at transit-oriented developments. That restricts the supply of housing, office and retail space while driving up the price.

The webinar marks the release of Smart Growth America's lay summary of the NITC report, called "Empty Spaces," which will be available to webinar attendees.

Watch the recorded webinar here.

The research, led by Reid Ewing of the University of Utah, is one of the first comprehensive data-driven reports to estimate peak parking and vehicle trip generation rates for transit-oriented development projects, as well as one of the first to estimate travel mode shares for TODs. Ewing analyzed data on actual parking usage and total trip generation near five transit stations: Redmond, Washington; Rhode Island Row in Washington, D.C.; Fruitvale Village in Oakland, California; Englewood, Colorado; and Wilshire/Vermont in Los...

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