OTREC research revitalizes transportation curriculum

Feb 05, 2014
OTREC research is helping change the face of transportation education.
Across the country, at the undergraduate level, universities typically offer an introductory transportation engineering course as part of a civil engineering program.
David Hurwitz of Oregon State University is one of several educators interested in renovating this intro course. In this OTREC research project, Hurwitz helped develop some activity-based learning modules to introduce students to transportation concepts. He points out it is the first time many undergraduate engineering students are exposed to transportation, and therefore, the perfect time to get their attention.
Hurwitz is a founding member of the National Transportation Curriculum Project (NTCP), an organization of approximately ten faculty members, at different universities around the country, that have been collaborating since 2009. The NTCP helped Hurwitz write a National Science Foundation grant to help fund this research project.
“This project stemmed from the recognition that we wanted to try and facilitate change in the way that we teach transportation engineering at the collegiate level, across the country,” Hurwitz said.
The main focus of the course renovation is to move toward activity-based learning, rather than a traditional...
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OTREC represented at American Planning Association’s 2013 conference

Apr 24, 2013

The American Planning Assocation held its annual conference in Chicago this April.

Two OTREC universities sent students to attend, and OTREC staff member Jon Makler attended the Intelligent Cities "Unconference," which was held on Wednesday, April 17.

In addition to Portland State University graduate student research group Celillo Planning Studio, which won the APA student award for Application of the Planning Process, there were other PSU students who attended just to soak up the conference. Two students from the University of Oregon also attended and created a research poster for the conference.

This year's APA gave some focus to transportation. In addition to Monday, April 15 being themed "Transportation Day: Transforming Cities Through Transportation," there were also a handful of other transportation events including workshops titled "Sustainability Implications for Urban Transportation" and "Transportation Planning in a Changing Climate."

Makler, OTREC’s Education and Technology Transfer Program Manager, said that one of this year's highlights for him was the Unconference: a facilitated, participant-driven meeting which encouraged attendees to explore the ideas they were most interested in talking about. OTREC was one of about 25 organizations to take part in the Unconference.

After...

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PSU's Intelligent Transportation Systems Lab is recognized nationwide

Apr 12, 2013

The quality of OTREC research has recently been recognized on a national level.

Selected data from the Portland Oregon Regional Transportation Archive Listing (PORTAL) will be part of a new national data sharing platform.

The US Department of Transportation has released the first version of this platform, called the Research Data Exchange, which collects and publishes archived and real-time transportation data from multiple sources.

In the language of their home page, the Research Data Exchange (called the RDE for short) was primarily developed to “support the development, testing, and demonstration of multi-modal transportation mobility applications being pursued under the USDOT ITS Dynamic Mobility Applications (DMA) Program and other connected vehicle research activities.”

In other words, USDOT created this database so they could use it. But – in the spirit of collaboration common to those with an interest in collecting and managing vast amounts of information – they’re sharing it.

The RDE is free and open to the...

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