curriculum | National Institute for Transportation and Communities

Wasatch Transportation Academy: Piloting an Investment in Community Capital

Sep 13, 2022

How can community members become more engaged in transportation decision making?

Individuals and groups can learn to effect powerful change, but success requires some familiarity with how civic processes work. Community Transportation Academies, or CTAs, provide a basic technical understanding of how a city or region’s transportation system operates, along with the decision makers and decision-making processes that determine how the system is shaped.

Supported by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), the new Wasatch Transportation Academy (WTA) at the University of Utah was piloted in 2022 in the Salt Lake City region. The research team developed a course vision, topics, and logistics for the WTA by interviewing stakeholders in the Utah Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget, the Utah Department of Transportation, the Utah Transit Authority, Salt Lake County, Salt Lake City, and the Wasatch Front Regional Council. Led by Nathan McNeil of Portland State University and Keith Bartholomew of the University of Utah, the WTA used the established Portland Traffic and Transportation class in Portland, Oregon as a framework.

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An Introduction to GIS for Dallas, Texas High Schoolers

Jul 13, 2022

Transportation can have a significant impact on vulnerable ecologies, especially in rapidly urbanizing regions such as Dallas/Fort Worth. In order for future professionals to balance the needs of sensitive environments with the mobility of people and goods, they must have the proper tools – among other things, a good grounding in regional mapping technologies.

To introduce high school students to geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial reasoning skills, researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) developed a four-week training workshop in ArcGIS and other emerging regional mapping technologies. The workshop was incorporated into an existing high school course focused on the transportation network and environmental justice issues in the communities along the Trinity River.

Led by the research team from UTA's College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs (Joowon Im, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, Alan Klein, Director at Institute of Urban Studies, Amruta Sakalker, Graduate Assistant in Planning), they partnered with CityLab High School in the Dallas Independent School District to pilot this workshop. The curriculum, which can be replicated for use by other teachers, introduces students...

Launching the Wasatch Transportation Academy in Utah: A Community-Building Learning Model

Apr 15, 2022

How could a free transportation class for people living in the Salt Lake City region strengthen community conversations and advocacy around local priorities in transportation policy? Researchers at Portland State University (PSU) and University of Utah (UU) explored that question by bringing a well-known learning model from Portland, Oregon to SLC.

For over 25 years, the Portland Bureau of Transportation has partnered with PSU to offer the Portland Traffic and Transportation Course – a free 10-week course designed to provide local community members the skills and knowledge to participate in transportation decisions affecting their neighborhoods. This model has proven to be a success story in public agency-university partnership in community education. Building upon a 2015 project that documented the Portland course and developed a curriculum handbook, the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) has provided more funding for a pilot community transportation class–the Wasatch Transportation Academy– in Salt Lake, City Utah. Their first class was held on January 24, 2022 (view class recordings here) and ran through...

NITC Supports the Creation of New Data Science Curriculum

Jan 17, 2018

Principal Investigator: Liming Wang, Portland State University

Project Overview: Introduction to Scientific Computing for Planners, Engineers, and Scientists

Learn more about this curriculum and how you can apply it at your school by viewing the one-page Executive Summary and the full Final Report on the Project Overview page.

A NITC education grant funded a new course for planners, engineers, scientists and students to help improve their data processing workflow.

Liming Wang, an assistant professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning at Portland State University, is on a mission to simplify data processing. A NITC education grant supported his efforts to develop a new course: Introduction to Data Science (Aug 6 - 10, 2018). The course is designed to help students and professionals to improve their workflow for data-intensive research. The course covers how to collect data, clean them up, visualize, explore, model and eventually compile the data with findings in a report.

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Multimodal curriculum brings students and planners up to speed

Mar 02, 2017

A NITC education project offers a new curriculum in multimodal transportation planning for graduate courses.

The development of this curriculum, along with a freshly minted course in multimodal transportation, allowed the University of South Florida (USF) to begin offering a graduate certificate in sustainable transportation for the first time in the spring of 2016.

The certificate program is multi-disciplinary and draws students from various fields including planning, engineering and public administration.

These educational efforts are designed to meet the needs of a growing field. Multimodal planning—planning for walking, cycling and transit in addition to auto travel—is becoming increasingly prioritized as communities across the U.S. redefine their planning practices.

As with any fast-developing discipline, the state of the practice sometimes outpaces existing courses and training materials.

Led by Kristine Williams, the USF Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) developed a set of training modules that can be used in university settings and also to help planners in the field stay on top of the latest developments.

“There are pieces of multimodal planning in different courses, but the state of the practice has really changed a lot. We wanted to develop a...