Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Data From: Active Transportation Counts From Existing On-Street Signal And Detection Infrastructure, Sirisha Kothuri, Patrick Allen Singleton, Mahyar Vahedi Saheli, Elizabeth Yates, Joseph P. Broach

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Datasets

This study’s objective was to use data from existing traffic signal infrastructure to estimate pedestrian volumes. Pedestrian push-button actuations were collected from signal controller logs at 49 intersections in western Oregon and an additional 16 intersections in eastern Oregon. These actuations were then compared to observed pedestrian counts, totaling over 34,000 people, obtained from video recordings. After exploring various options, a simple quadratic relationship was modeled using a single measure of pedestrian signal activity: the number of push-button presses (filtered to remove multiple presses within 15 seconds). The model’s predictions showed a correlation of 0.86 with observed pedestrian volumes and …

Warming Of The Willamette River, 1850–Present: The Effects Of Climate Change And Direct Human Interventions, Stefan Talke, David Jay, Heida Diefenderfer

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Using archival research methods, we found and combined data from multiple sources to produce a unique, 140 year record of daily water temperature (Tw) in the lower Willamette River, Oregon (1881–1890, 1941–present). Additional daily weather and river flow records from the 1850s onwards are used to develop and validate a statistical regression model of Tw for 1850–2020. The model simulates the time-lagged response of Tw to air temperature and river flow, and is calibrated for three distinct time periods: the late 19th, mid 20th, and early 21st centuries. Results show that Tw has trended upwards at ~1.1 °C …

The Impact Of New Light Rail Service On Employment Growth In Portland, Oregon, Lahar Santra

Dissertations and Theses

This study quantitatively examines the impact of the new Light Rail Transit (LRT) service on employment growth in retail, knowledge, and service sectors before and after opening the LRT. At the corridor level, this study conducts a case study of Greenline in Southeast Portland, Oregon. The results of the corridor level study suggest that the new LRT service increased employment along the Greenline corridor among all the three sectors of interest- retail, knowledge, service in the long-term (ten years) while having slightly different results for the short-term (five years), likely due to the slow growth of LRT benefits. This study …

Examining Bicycle And Motorized Vehicle Speeds And Their Relationships In The Context Of Urban Roadways, Jaclyn Sue Schaefer

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis presents a compilation of papers exploring passenger car and bicycle speeds through their interactions with each other and with urban roadway factors.

First, following a concern raised in part of the traffic literature that a large mode shift toward bicycling may cause travel time delays and potentially exacerbate congestion instead of alleviate it unless bicycle lanes are installed, an empirical study detailing how the presence of bicycles on urban roads without bicycle lanes may affect passenger car speeds is presented. Pneumatic tube data from six predominantly low speed, low volume roads in Portland, Oregon were utilized to identify …

Methodologies To Quantify Transit Performance Metrics At The System-Level Using High-Resolution Gps, Stop-Level, And Gtfs Archived Transit Data, Travis Bradley Glick

Dissertations and Theses

Performance metrics have typically focused at two main scales: a microscopic scale that focuses on specific locations, time-periods, and trips; and, a macroscopic scale that averages metrics over longer times, entire routes, and networks. When applied to entire transit systems, microscopic methodologies often have computational limitations while macroscopic methodologies ascribe artificial uniformity to non-uniform analysis areas. These limitations highlight the need for a middle approach.

This dissertation presents a mesoscopic analysis based around timepoint-segments, which are a novel application of an existing system for many transit agencies. For this research, routes are divided into a consecutive group of bus stops …

An Equity Focused Study On The Trip Temporal Distributions Of Vulnerable Road Users, Santiago Espinosa Wild

Civil and Environmental Engineering Master's Project Reports

The United States is a megadiverse nation with a transportation system that, for decades, was designed to serve primarily able-bodied, white, male motorists. This legacy creates a situation in which varying socio-demographic groups experience the transportation system differently with contrasting safety, accessibility, and convenience outcomes. This project introduces descriptive statistics and binary logistic models that provide transportation professionals and policy makers with a quantitative understanding on how, why, and when certain socio-demographic groups are more likely to engage in a trip. This project provides tools to measure and understand the equity implications of a wide array of transportation policy decisions. …

How Av Could Shape Our Cities - Research From The Netherlands, Gonçalo H. A. Correia

PSU Transportation Seminars

Automated driving has become a hot topic of research in different fields of science. Despite the great advancements in the vehicle technology itself, researchers are now concerned in figuring out what will be the impacts of these vehicles in life as we know it. These impacts can be rather broad from traffic safety to the economy. In this lecture, Goncalo will focus on the research that is being done at TU Delft, a leading university in automated vehicles’ (AVs) impacts research, focusing on urban areas and how mobility, and even the city itself, can change with fully-automated vehicles. Goncalo Correia …

That Bike Is Too Heavy: Merging Bicycling Physics, Human Physiology And Travel Behavior, Alexander Y. Bigazzi

PSU Transportation Seminars

Are the Biketown bikes too heavy? Does better gear motivate people to cycle more? How much faster will someone go on an e-bike?

Although urban cycling is widely known as physically active transportation, the actual physics of cycling have been given little attention in transportation engineering and planning. In contrast, the field of sports science has developed detailed data and models of road bicycle performance, but only for sport and racing cyclists.

What can we learn about utilitarian cycling by integrating knowledge of the physical attributes of bicycles and cyclists?

This seminar examines the ways in which bicycle physics, and …

An Agent-Based Evacuation Model To Improve Safety In The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Haizhong Wang

PSU Transportation Seminars

This seminar will present ongoing research into how integrated social, natural, and engineered systems can improve life safety under threat of multi-hazards. The targeted scenario is a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, threatening communities along 1,000 miles of the US Pacific Northwest coastline.

Since the mid-1980’s scientific evidence has underscored the possibility of such an extreme event, and it has taken at least another decade or more before public attitudes and policy have begun to adapt to this new hazard. Life safety is a pressing issue for the near-field CSZ tsunami hazard for several reasons. …

Webinar: Rethinking Streets For Bikes: An Evidence Based Guide Of Bike-Friendly Street Retrofits, Marc Schlossberg, Roger Lindgren

TREC Webinar Series

There is a growing demand for better infrastructure and fewer barriers to biking and other forms of space-efficient micromobility. Tackling daily trips by bike is easier on the environment, healthier for users and non-users alike, uses precious urbanized public and private land more efficiently, costs taxpayers less to build and maintain infrastructure, and when routes are safe and comfortable, moving by bike is also fun! Complete Streets policies are being adopted across the country, and there is an active conversation around the safety imperative of a Complete Streets approach. Yet, local officials often need both design guidance and the …

Webinar: Modeling Freeway Traffic In A Mixed Environment: Connected And Human-Driven Vehicles, Xianfeng Terry Yang

TREC Webinar Series

Although connected vehicles (CVs) will soon go beyond testbeds, CVs and human-driven vehicles (HVs) will co-exist over a long period. Hence, it is critical to consider the interactions between these two types of vehicles in traffic flow modeling. In this study, we aim to develop a macroscopic model to understand how CVs would impact HVs in the traffic stream. Grounded on the second-order traffic flow model, we study the relationships among flow, density, and speed by two sets of formulations for the groups of CVs and HVs, respectively. A set of friction factors, which indicate CVs' impact to HVs, are …

Modeling Changes In Public Transit And Private-For-Hire Usage When Implementing A Spatial Tax, Ty Lazarchik

REU Final Reports

Private-for-Hire (PfH) transportation options, such as Uber, Lyft, and taxicabs, are consistently growing in popularity. With this expanded utilization, cities are struggling to maintain usage of their public transit systems. While PfH transportation has been heavily researched, there is a need to further study how its effects on transit usage may be minimized. In this paper, previous work in traffic modeling and analysis of transit and PfH differences are expanded to develop an agent-based decision model in order to simulate and analyze the effectiveness of implementing a location-based tax in and around the city center of Portland, Oregon. The results …

The Influence Of Shared Mobility And Transportation Policies On Vehicle Ownership, Edgar Bertini Ruas

PSU Transportation Seminars

With the emergence of several new providers of shared mobility services, such as Uber, Biketown and Car2go, there has been the promise of changes to the traditional way of owning and using a vehicle. One potential consequence of the new mobility services is the reduction in vehicle ownership. At the same time, cities are trying to anticipate these changes by reducing the amount of space dedicated to parking. This thesis aims to asses the extent to which new shared mobility and transportation policy strategies (especially parking requirements and transit pass availability) relate to vehicle ownership among residents of multifamily dwellings. …

Webinar: Segmenting The Market For Transportation Demand Management Campaigns, Philip L. Winters, Amy Lester

TREC Webinar Series

Social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviors that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good. It is a useful transportation demand management (TDM) planning approach to promote travel behavior change. The purpose of this study was to explore a consumer market segmentation technique successfully used in Europe for its applicability to marketing efforts in the United States. Attitudinal and demographic data were collected from 1900 individuals in Florida, Oregon, and Virginia modeled after the European approach. Clustering analysis was applied to divide the sample into segments so that members of …

Scenarios For Adoption Of Autonomous Vehicle Technologies In Freight, Sabya Mishra

PSU Transportation Seminars

Innovation adoption research has largely ignored organizational adoption, and little work has been done to understand or predict the adoption of innovations by freight organizations. Among the existing innovation adoption theoretical and methodological approaches this seminar will explore which are most appropriate methods for freight organizational adoption. The seminar will present a disaggregate market penetration model for freight transportation organizations adopting connected autonomous vehicle (CAV) technology and demonstrate an application using a case study area in Memphis, TN. The seminar will highlight ongoing and future organizational adoption research for CAVs, and other innovations.

Webinar: Addressing Bicycle-Vehicle Conflicts With Alternate Signal Control Strategies, Sirisha Kothuri

TREC Webinar Series

There is nationwide interest in supporting sustainable and active transportation modes such as bicycling and walking due to the many benefits associated with them, including reduced congestion, lower emissions and improved health. Although the number of bicyclists is increasing, safety remains a top concern. In urban areas, a common crash type involving bicycles at intersections is the “right hook” where a right-turning vehicle collides with a through bicyclist. While geometric treatments and pavement markings have been studied, there is a lack of research on signal timing treatments to address right-hook bicycle-vehicle conflicts.

Addressing Bicycle-Vehicle Conflicts with Alternate Signal Control Strategies …

Data From: Market Segment Prediction Tool, Philip L. Winters, Amy Lester

TREC Datasets and Databases

Social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviors that benefit individuals and communities for the greater social good. Social marketing is a useful transportation demand management (TDM) planning approach to promote travel-behavior change, and combines at least seven distinguishing features that sets it apart from other popular, behavior-change planning approaches, such as education and mass media campaigns. These seven features include a focus on socially beneficial behavior change; a strong consumer orientation; the use of audience segmentation techniques and the selection of target audiences; the use of marketing’s conceptual framework (marketing mix and …

Webinar: Meeting & Exceeding Mobility User Expectations With Real-Time Transit Information, Sean J. Barbeau, Derek Fretheim

TREC Webinar Series

Every day transit riders ask the same question: when’s the next one coming? To answer this question, transit agencies are transitioning to providing real-time transit information through smartphones or displayed at transit stops.

The proliferation of transit planning and real time arrival tools that have hit the market over the past decade is staggering. Yet with transit ridership on the decline, agencies can’t afford to ignore the importance of providing accurate, real time information to their customers. Real-time transit information improves the reliability and efficiency of passenger travel, but barriers have prevented some transit agencies from adopting the GTFSrealtime v1.0 …

A Survey Of Ride-Hailing Passengers, Steven Gehrke

PSU Transportation Seminars

In less than a decade, the ride-hailing industry, led by Uber and Lyft, has dramatically transformed the way we travel in our metro regions. Rider adoption of these on-demand mobility services has proceeded much quicker than our understanding of their impacts to our urban transportation systems. Planning for this transformation in personal mobility, which will have unintended consequences, has been made more difficult by the scarcity in meaningful data made available by these ride-hailing companies. Public agencies responsible for managing congestion and transit services are hindered in their ability to successfully plan for the integration of this emergent travel mode …

Analysis Of The Contribution Of Transportation And Land Use To Citizen Perceptions Of Livability, Rebecca Lewis

PSU Transportation Seminars

What is livability? How does the built environment influence resident perceptions of livability? Although livability is a broadly used term and a key goal in land use and transportation plans at the state level, it is unclear whether residents think their neighborhoods are livable and what contributes to their perception of livability. The purpose of the project was to understand how Oregonians, in neighborhoods of varying densities and within Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), perceive livability at the nexus of transportation and land use. We sought to understand how residents define and perceive livability in three different MPOs in the state: …

Fhwa Guidebook For Measuring Multimodal Network Connectivity, Joseph Broach

PSU Transportation Seminars

In 2016 the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) published a Guidebook for Developing Pedestrian and Bicycle Performance Measures that presents methods for measuring walking and bicycling performance and activities and embedding them into the transportation planning and decisionmaking process (U.S. Department of Transportation 2016). Building on the 2016 guidebook, this resource focuses on pedestrian and bicycle network connectivity and provides information on incorporating connectivity measures into state, metropolitan, and local transportation planning processes.

Connectivity measures can help transportation practitioners identify high priority network gaps, implement cost-effective solutions that address multiple needs, optimize potential co-benefits, and …

Transportation Impacts Of Affordable Housing: Informing Development Review With Travel Behavior Analysis, Amanda Howell

PSU Transportation Seminars

Planning for affordable housing is challenged by development policies that often do not differentiate between the travel patterns of residents of market-rate housing and those living in affordable units. The development review process generally requires an evaluation of the anticipated additional transportation demand that new development places on the system and an assessment of fees or improvements to mitigate these impacts.

However, industry standard guidelines for assessment of travel demand outlined within the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Trip Generation Handbook have been focused solely on vehicle trip rates for these traffic impact analyses. Given the public goals of providing …

Transit Demand Analysis And User Classification Using Automatic Fare Collection (Afc) Data, Alireza Khani

PSU Transportation Seminars

Development of origin-destination demand matrices is crucial for transit planning. The development process is facilitated by transit automated data, making it possible to mine boarding and alighting patterns on an individual basis. This research proposes a novel stochastic trip chaining method which uses Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) and General Transit Feed Specifications (GTFS) data to infer an origin-destination (O-D) matrix.

Road Diet V2.0 - Road Diet With Roundabouts, Michael Williams

PSU Transportation Seminars

How can we go one step, or one lane, further than the standard road diet? Roundabouts allow a road diet to reduce the final number of lanes from three to two.

Questions arise when roundabouts are used with a road diet. What traffic volumes are supportable? Will the roundabouts fit within existing intersections? What does current guidance tell us about this approach?

Michael Williams will present his work on creating a sequel to FHWA’s Road Diet Informational Guide. This work is intended to provide a feasibility determination tool for the application of this approach to existing corridors. Data from Bird …

Evaluation Of Route Changes Utilizing High-Resolution Gps Bus Transit Data, Travis Bradley Glick

PSU Transportation Seminars

Congestion and travel delay on urban roadways can influence operating costs and service attractiveness. This research uses high resolution bus data to examine sources of delay on urban arterials. A set of tools was created to help visualize trends in bus behavior and movement; this allowed larger traffic trends to be visualized along urban corridors and urban streets. By using buses as probes and examining aggregated bus behavior, contoured speed plots can be used to understand the behavior of roadways outside the zone of influence of bus stops. Speed plots can be utilized to discover trends and travel patterns with …

Exploring The Determinants Of Vulnerable Road Users’ Crash Severity In State Roads, Álvaro Caviedes

PSU Transportation Seminars

Part of the Student Presentations from TRB

Pedestrians and bicyclists are the most vulnerable road users and suffer the most severe consequences when crashes take place. An extensive literature is available for crash severity in terms of driver safety, but fewer studies have explored non-motorized users’ crash severity. Furthermore, most research efforts have examined pedestrian and bicyclist crash severity in urban areas. This study focuses on state roads (mostly outside major urban areas) and aims to identify contributing risk factors of fatal and severe crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists in state roads. The results seem to suggest that besides improvements …

Spatial Transferability Assessment Of A Composite Walkability Index: The Pedestrian Index Of The Environment (Pie), Gabriel Lefebvre-Ropars, Catherine Morency, Patrick A. Singleton, Kelly J. Clifton

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper analyzes the transferability of a composite walkability index, the Pedestrian Index of the Environment (PIE), to the Greater Montréal Area (GMA). The PIE was developed in Portland, Oregon, and is based on proprietary data. It combines six urban form variables into a score ranging from 20 to 100. The measure introduces several methodological refinements which have not been applied concurrently in previous efforts: a wide coverage of the different dimensions of the urban form, together with the use of a distance-based decay function and modelling-based weighing of the variables.

Utilizing High-Resolution Archived Transit Data To Study Before-And-After Travel-Speed And Travel-Time Conditions, Travis Bradley Glick

Dissertations and Theses

Travel times, operating speeds, and service reliability influence costs and service attractiveness. This paper outlines an approach to quantify how these metrics change after a modification of roadway design or transit routes using archived transit data. The Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (TriMet), Portland's public transportation provider, archives automatic vehicle location (AVL) data for all buses as part of their bus dispatch system (BDS). This research combines three types of AVL data (stop event, stop disturbance, and high-resolution) to create a detailed account of transit behavior; this probe data gives insights into the behavior of transit as well as …

Countywide Bluetooth System: Use Cases & Performance Measures, Shaun Quayle

PSU Transportation Seminars

Washington County has 124 permanent roadside Bluetooth readers, which passively and in an anonymous fashion collect travel time, speed, and origin-destination information across the major arterials in the urban County. This presentation gives an overview of the program purpose, history, some interesting use cases, and the formation of comparative performance metrics to gauge the magnitude and duration of congestion across the County. These metrics and information will help planners improve travel demand models, consultants improve traffic analyses, operations staff prioritize timing, detection, and maintenance functions, agencies inform traveler information data, and leaders better communicate the story of traffic demand, delay, …

Evaluation Of Roadway Reallocation Projects: Analysis Of Before-And-After Travel Speeds And Congestion Utilizing High-Resolution Bus Transit Data, Miguel A. Figliozzi, Travis B. Glick

TREC Final Reports

The traditional process of identifying corridors for road diet improvements involves selecting potential corridors (mostly based on identifying fourlane roads) and conducting a traffic impact analysis of proposed changes on a selected roadway before implementing changes. The evaluation of roadway reallocation projects should include the analysis of traffic volumes, level of service, speeds, queue lengths and bus operations. There are tools and equipment to evaluate effectively traffic volumes and level of service changes in before-and-after studies. However, the detailed evaluation of speed and queue length distributions along a segment are significantly more cumbersome. In addition, the exhaustive evaluation of bus …