National Institute for Transportation and Communities

The latest report from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) offers recommendations to increase multimodal travel among youth in Portland, Oregon. Communications strategies derived from focus groups of middle-school aged Portland Public School (PPS) students are aimed at helping the Portland Bureau of Transportation and TriMet, the transit provider for the Portland metropolitan region, to engage more with young riders and encourage them to form lasting habits of car-free travel.

The research team chose to focus on seventh, eighth, and ninth grade students because they will soon be eligible for the free transit service provided by TriMet to all PPS high schoolers. Researchers wanted to focus on this critical decision-making stage to affect long-term behavior change towards opting for non-car travel....

We held our annual flagship professional development event, Transportation & Communities, on September 13 and 14. In honor of the event's ten-year anniversary, we changed up the format: Rather than a typical conference with one-hour sessions and a keynote gathering, we offered a selection of intensive half-day workshops. See photos from the event.

The workshops gave practitioners a chance to take a deep dive into new skills in order to walk away with new tools or frameworks that could be applied to their work. We offered a review of congestion mitigation strategies, universal access and equity in pedestrian planning, and discussion on how smart technology could be implemented in suburban communities. Several workshops were based on findings from new research by the National Institute for Transportation & Communities (NITC), the six-university consortium which sponsored the event. The NITC...

The National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) program has released its 2018 Small Starts request for proposals (RFP). Faculty at NITC's partner universities* are invited to submit abstracts by September 17, 2018.

The Small Starts grant assists researchers (based at NITC partner universities) who are interested in transportation but have not had an opportunity to undertake a small project ($20,000 or less). Read about the Small Starts projects that were funded in 2017. Projects must be consistent with NITC's theme of improving the mobility of people and goods to build strong communities.

Our theme includes a few key topics:

• Increasing access to opportunities
• Improving multi-modal planning and shared use of infrastructure
• Advancing innovation and smart cities
• Developing data, models, and tools

Key Dates

• RFP Opens: July 18, 2018
• Proposals due: September 17, 2018
• Award Selection: Sept-Oct 2018
• Projects begin & funds become available: December...

Stephanie Nappa, University of Oregon

LiveMove Student Group | LinkedIn

We're shining our student spotlight this month on Stephanie Nappa, president of the University of Oregon student group LiveMove. On May 24, LiveMove will host a speaker series event with Oboi Reed, the Executive Director of Equiticity, to discuss equity in biking.

Tell us about yourself:

I’m a former engineer and chemist who began studying planning once I learned there was a career that would allow me to talk endlessly about transportation systems without simply receiving polite nods. Currently, I’m about to finish my Master of Community and Regional Planning degree from the University of Oregon, where I’ve focused my studies on active transportation. This past summer I had the opportunity to take a study abroad course on bicycle transportation in Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands, which was an incredible...