Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Green Loop Swpdx Concept Plan: Alignment And Design Treatment Recommendations For The Southwest Green Loop, Ashley Eaton, Brian Gunn, Jake Adams, Kate Washington, Mohd Meidiansyah

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

The Green Loop SWPDX project was conducted by five students in partnership with the Portland Bureau of Planning & Sustainability Urban Design Studio and Portland State University's Campus Planning Office. It explores potential alignments and design treatments for Portland's Green Loop, specifically with the southwest downtown quardrant of the Central City. The southwest quadrant of the Green Loop links the South Park Blocks to the non-automobile Tilikum Crossing bridge. The Green Loop SWPDX project explores both large and small-scale possibilities for creating a sense of safety and a place for cyclists and pedestrians in the Central City. This document reports …

Getting Green To Work In The Northwest Industrial District, Stefan Heisler, Sara Ivey, Alexis Kelso, Ryu Sakuma, John Dornoff, Dianne Yee

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

Forest Park and its surrounding watershed experience measurable environmental problems such as urban heat island impacts, increased storm water runoff containing pollutants, fragmentations of habitat connectivity due to their proximities to high-impact land uses, poor air quality, absence of public space, and lack of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. Getting Green to Work in the Northwest Industrial District identifies strategies to address environmental issues that affect local human and environmental health in the Northwest Indusrial District, Forest Park and the Willamette River, while benefiting local businesses workers and firms. Getting Green to Work explores voluntary approaches to address local environmental problems …

Paalf People's Plan: East Portland Pilot, Todd Borkowitz, Lorrie Chang, Christine Corrales, Leslee Humphrey, D. H. Strongheart, Timothy Wood

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

Recognizing the traumatic experience of being forced to move and losing community, this plan reflects the hopes of community members who seek to rebuild their lives in a new place. The East Portland Pilot Plan applies the urban planning practice of placemaking as a transformative intervention for addressing challenges and stabilizing the Black community in East Portland. This plan also emerges at a critical time, as existing city plans for East Portland indicate significant future public investment and development.

This plan has been written with a wide audience in mind. The material is relevant to homeowners, community activists, urban planners, …

The Green Loop Swpdx Workshop Project, Brian Gunn, Kate Washington, Jake Adams, Ashley Eaton, Mohd Meidiansyah

PSU Transportation Seminars

The Bureau of Planning and Sustainability proposes the construction of the Green Loop, a 10-mile linear public open space proposed in the West Quadrant Plan update that will further link the east and west sides of the Central City. In addition to physically affirming both sides of the river as part of the Central City, the Green Loop is expected to create a second ring of pedestrian and bicycle access, much like the East Bank Esplanade and Tom McCall Waterfront Park, that will draw activity to retail further from the river.

The Green Loop addresses both the City of Portland’s …

Transforming A Historic Highway In Small Town Mosier Into A Vibrant Main Street, Amanda Davidowitz, Kaleidoscope Student Planners

PSU Transportation Seminars

Kaleidoscope Student Planners, a group of six students in the Master’s of Urban and Regional Planning program at Portland State University, are working with Mosier, Oregon’s City Council to develop the Slow Mo’ Main Street Concept Plan. The goal for the project is to develop conceptual designs and programmatic recommendations for historic Highway 30 (which runs through the town), to help ensure that Mosier’s Main Street reflects community priorities, supports a thriving downtown, and creates a safe and inviting corridor for people traveling on foot, by bike and by motor vehicle. During this seminar we will reflect on our process …

New Fhwa Vmt Forecasts Implications For Local Planning, Andrew Mortensen

PSU Transportation Seminars

A summary of FHWA’s new national traffic trends assessment will be presented, including discussion of varied factors influencing forward-thinking forecasts. Examples of Oregon statewide vehicle miles travelled (VMT) and historic traffic trends from ATR stations in the Portland urban region and greater Willamette Valley will be highlighted. VMT, population and income data will be noted with implications on local transportation planning.

Development Of A Pedestrian Demand Estimation Tool: A Destination Choice Model, Christopher D. Muhs

PSU Transportation Seminars

There is growing support for improvements to the quality of the walking environment, including more investments to promote pedestrian travel. Planners, engineers, and others seek improved tools to estimate pedestrian demand that are sensitive to environmental and demographic factors at the appropriate scale in order to aid policy-relevant issues like air quality, public health, and smart allocation of infrastructure and other resources. Further, in the travel demand forecasting realm, tools of this kind are difficult to implement due to the use of spatial scales of analysis that are oriented towards motorized modes, vast data requirements, and computer processing limitations.

To …

Travel Decisions & Their Implications For Urban Transportation: From Campus Transportation To Statewide Modeling, Gulsah Akar

PSU Transportation Seminars

The ability to forecast future transportation patterns under a particular land-use scenario or urban form is key to making informed decisions at the local and regional levels.

Although several researchers have explored the links between the built environment, socio-demographics and travel behavior, a consensus is not reached.

This talk highlights two recent projects. The first project focuses on individuals’ attitudes towards transportation, neighborhood characteristics and their effects on campus commuters’ transit use, and addresses the question whether attitudes, the built environment or a combination of both explains the resulting transit use better.

The second part presents the Regional Land Use …

2014 Transit Oriented Developments Survey, Jennifer Dill, Nathan Mcneil

TREC Final Reports

This report presents results from surveys of residents at several transit-oriented developments (TODs) in Portland, Hillsboro, Tigard, and unincorporated Clackamas County. The research complements our previous survey work for Metro done at eight TODs in 2010 and 11 TODs in 2007.

Making Streets Into Complete Streets, Marc Schlossberg, John Rowell

TREC Project Briefs

Researchers created a manual to aid planners in adopting complete streets policies and designs.

Mobility And Accessibility In Shrinking Cities, Joanna Ganning

TREC Project Briefs

A University of Utah researcher explores the synthesis of mobility- and accessibility-based transportation planning in the context of urban decay.

Using Multimodal Performance Measures To Prioritize Improvements On Us 101 In San Luis Obispo County, Jessica Berry

PSU Transportation Seminars

The US 101 Corridor Mobility Master Plan in San Luis Obispo was a two-year planning effort that evaluated the 70 mile corridor on 12 performance measures. This collaborative effort was led by the San Luis Obispo Council of Governments (SLOCOG).

Performance based planning is becoming more important for agencies receiving State and Federal funding. Smaller, rural regional agencies will have to find ways to collect, report, and use performance metrics with limited resources. SLOCOG's first performance-based planning effort was the US 101 Corridor Mobility Master Plan, funded through a State grant.

Funding for this project came from a …

Dash: The Portland Region's Next-Generation Activity-Based Model, Richard Walker

PSU Transportation Seminars

DASH is the next generation activity based model being developed by the Metro Research Center. Upon completion, it will be one of the most advanced in the nation. This model will be used extensively in estimating the activity and travel response of individuals to policies and infrastructure investments. Compared to past models, it will include enhanced consideration of the socio-economic roles of individuals, discrete temporal dynamics, and intra-household dependencies.

Geometric Design, Speed, And Safety, Richard J. Porter

PSU Transportation Seminars

In this seminar, Dr. Porter will explore the interactions of geometric design decisions, speed, and safety. A performance-based approach to this topic will be considered given the availability of several key documents, including the Highway Safety Manual and TRB's Modeling Operating Speed: Synthesis Report as well as a significant body of published research. A historical look at the design speed concept will show that while the design speed definition has changed on more than one occasion, the same basic but flawed philosophy that relates design speed to a “safe speed” is still reflected in supplemental guidance related to design speed …

The Sfpark Pilot: Using Data To Make Cities Better, Kathryn Doherty-Chapman

PSU Transportation Seminars

SFpark was a federally-funded pilot program of a new approach to managing parking in San Francisco. It utilized real time data to identify parking availability, and demand-responsive parking pricing to help make parking easier to find. Parking management is an invaluable transportation demand management tool and the SFpark pilot demonstrated how data can help cities make smarter decisions. Come hear about the pilot evaluation results from a former SFpark staffer and PSU alum.

Transit-Oriented Development And Equity In Latino Neighborhoods: A Comparative Case Study Of Macarthur Park (Los Angeles) And Fruitvale (Oakland), Gerardo Francisco Sandoval, Roanel Herrera

TREC Final Reports

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 …

How Affordable Is Hud Affordable Housing?, Reid Ewing, Shima Hamidi

TREC Final Reports

This paper assesses the affordability of HUD rental assistance properties from the standpoint of transportation costs. HUD housing is, by definition, affordable from the standpoint of housing costs due to limits on the amounts renters are required to pay. However, there are no such limitations on transportation costs, and common sense suggests that renters in remote locations may be forced to pay more than 15 percent of income, a nominal affordability standard, for transportation costs. Using household travel models estimated with data from 15 diverse regions around the U.S., we estimated and summed automobile capital costs, automobile operating costs, and …

Webinar: A Comprehensive Evaluation Of Protected Cycling Facilities: Lessons From Five Cities, Christopher Monsere

TREC Webinar Series

As cities move to increase levels of bicycling for transportation, many practitioners and advocates have promoted the use of protected bike lanes (also known as “cycle tracks” or “protected bikeways”) as an important component in providing high-quality urban infrastructure for cyclists. These on-street lanes provide more space and physical separation between the bike lane and motor vehicle lane compared with traditional striped bike lanes. However, few U.S. cities have direct experiences with their design and operations, in part because of the limited design guidance provided in the past. There is limited research from North America on protected bike lanes, but …

Self-Organizing Signals: A Better Framework For Transit Signal Priority, Peter G. Furth

PSU Transportation Seminars

Actuated traffic signal control logic has many advantages because of its responsiveness to traffic demands, short cycles, effective use of capacity leading to and recovering from oversaturation, and amenability to aggressive transit priority. Its main drawback has been its inability to provide good progression along arterials. However, the traditional way of providing progression along arterials, coordinated-actuated control with a common, fixed cycle length, has many drawbacks stemming from its long cycle lengths, inflexibility in recovering from priority interruptions, and ineffective use of capacity during periods of oversaturation. This research explores a new paradigm for traffic signal control, “self-organizing signals,” based …

Empirical Evaluation Of Transit Signal Priority Through Fusion Of Heterogeneous Transit And Traffic Signal Data And Novel Performance Measures, Wei Feng

PSU Transportation Seminars

Transit signal priority (TSP) is designed to reduce delay for transit vehicles through signalized intersections. For an existing TSP system, it is important to assess how timely and effective TSP phases are granted to buses that request priority. It is also necessary to evaluate the time savings and delays for buses and other vehicles as a result of TSP phases. However, due to the lack of disaggregated and integrated transit, traffic and signal phase data, previous studies have not investigated the TSP performance at the phase level. This study collects and integrates three archived databases: bus automatic vehicle location (AVL) …

Retirement Security In Oregon, Jeff Renfro, Marisol Cáceres, Peter Hulseman

Northwest Economic Research Center Publications and Reports

By expanding access to retirement savings plans, a state-sponsored program for workers should increase the overall level of participation, and, ultimately, increase retirement fund income. The over 400,000 new enrollees estimated by this study suggests that these programs can have large impacts.

Active Transportation Research At Northern Arizona University, Edward J. Smaglik

PSU Transportation Seminars

Dr. Smaglik is currently working on three separate transportation research projects at Northern Arizona University. This talk will touch briefly on each of the three projects, the concepts behind them, workplans, and expected deliverables. The projects include work with the Oregon DOT on the impact of less than optimal vehicle detection on adaptive control algorithms, development of a ped priority algorithm through a NITC project (as a Portland State subcontractor), and internally funded work on a power harvesting traffic sensor.

Crowdsourcing Cycling Safety And Route Data With The “Orcycle” Smartphone App, Miguel Figliozzi

PSU Transportation Seminars

ORcycle is a new smartphone application (for both Android and iOS) developed by Transportation, Technology, and People (TTP) lab researchers at Portland State University as part of an Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) research project. ORcycle collects user, route, infrastructure, crash, and safety data. ORcycle was successfully launched in early November 2014 and presents many improvements over existing or similar apps. Initial data findings and insights will be presented. Lessons learned as well as opportunities and challenges associated with smartphone data collection methods will be discussed. More information about the app can be found here: http://www.pdx.edu/transportation-lab/orcycle.

Economic Equity In Communities Of Color: The Effectiveness Of Minority Contracting Initiatives, Matthew Chorpenning, Ann Curry-Stevens, Greg Schrock, Nathen Lamb

Center to Advance Racial Equity Publications and Reports

As the movement for racial equity takes hold in Portland, Oregon, we look for examples of where the living conditions of communities of color are improving. One concrete initiative that many point to is the array of minority contracting efforts whereby minority-owned businesses are supported by various levels of government in ways that are entrenched in both policy and practice. This report looks at the most recent data on minority contracting, as well as minority hiring policies, research-based best practices and a case study of the Sellwood Bridge project and determines that much more can and should be done to …

Transportation System Impacts On Bicyclists' Air Pollution Risks: Considerations For System Design And Use, Alexander Y. Bigazzi, Miguel Figliozzi, James F. Pankow, Wentai Luo

PSU Transportation Seminars

Health risks associated with air pollution uptake while bicycling are often cited as a potential drawback to increased bicycling in cities. This seminar will provide an overview of how roadway and travel characteristics impact bicyclists' uptake of traffic-related air pollution. Specific considerations for planners and designers of urban transportation systems to mitigate risks for travelers will be discussed. In addition, the extent to which bicyclists themselves can unilaterally reduce their pollution uptake will be described. This seminar synthesizes findings from a recently completed doctoral dissertation at Portland State University and from the broader literature.

Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership: An Economic Impact Analysis, Jeff Renfro, Marisol Cáceres, Peter Hulseman

Northwest Economic Research Center Publications and Reports

Large, technology manufacturers tend to dominate the Oregon manufacturing discussion, but as the preceding results show, smaller manufacturers like metalworkers and bakeries can produce large numbers of new jobs, particularly when given technical assistance. The aggregate effect of employment increases from small- and medium-sized firms is large, and contributes to sectors identified as priorities by Oregon’s economic development agencies.

Factors Associated With The Bicycle Commute Use Of Newcomers: Analysis Of The 70 Largest U.S. Cities, Ryan Dann

PSU Transportation Seminars

Bicycling is known to produce benefits for cities, in regards to reducing levels of congestion, generating positive health outcomes, and providing affordable transportation options to low-income families. Conventional analysis of urban bicycle commuting does not currently consider the importance of separating migrant, or “newcomer,” bicycle commute use from pre-existing resident bicycle commute use. The goal of this paper is to provide additional information on individual, social, and environmental factors that influence newcomer bicycle use for commuting purposes. This cross-sectional study used data from the 2007-2011 American Community Survey (5-year Estimates) to analyze the bicycle commute use of newcomers in the …

The Theory Of Travel Decision-Making: A Conceptual Framework Of Active Travel Behavior, Patrick Allen Singleton

PSU Transportation Seminars

We present a unifying conceptual framework of active travel behavior called the theory of travel decision-making. It integrates seminal travel-related concepts from economics, geography, and psychology with active travel behavior theories and empirical research. The framework abstracts an individual’s thought process around short-term travel decisions and explains the roles of activities, built environment factors, socio-demographics, attitudes and perceptions, and habit. Our primary objective is to inform travel behavior research by meeting the need for a theoretical framework capable of guiding studies on active transportation. The framework could also support active transportation planning and analysis methods by informing the development of …

Who Uses Peer-To-Peer Carsharing? Early Exploration, Anaïs Mathez

PSU Transportation Seminars

Peer-to-peer (P2P) carsharing is a system where a facilitating company connects car owners to car renters. Such systems are relatively new in the U.S. This paper aims to understand who is participating in P2P carsharing as a renter (as opposed to as an owner), why they join, whether and how often they rent vehicles, and why. Exploring these questions may provide insight on the potential for P2P carsharing to meet public policy objectives of reducing the impacts of personal vehicle ownership and use and providing mobility options for underserved populations. The analysis is based on 465 study participants who enrolled …

Leveraging Signal Infrastructure For Non-Motorized Counts In A Statewide Program: A Pilot Study, Bryan Philip Blanc

PSU Transportation Seminars

Transportation agencies are beginning to explore and develop non-motorized counting programs. This paper presents the results of a pilot study testing the use of existing signal infrastructure – 2070 signal controllers with advanced software to log pedestrian phase actuations and detections from bicycle lane inductive loops – to count pedestrians and bicycles. The pilot study was conducted at a typical suburban signalized intersection with heavy motorized traffic that was instrumented on all four approaches with pedestrian push buttons and advance inductive loops in the bicycle lane for signal operation. One day (24 hours) of video data were collected as ground …