Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Statistical Inference For Multimodal Travel Time Reliability, Avinash Unnikrishnan, Miguel Figliozzi, Subhash C. Kochar

TREC Final Reports

Travel time reliability is a key metric of interest to practitioners and researchers because it affects travel choice and the economic competitiveness of urban areas. This research focuses on three travel time reliability metrics – buffer index, modified buffer index, and the relative width of travel time distributions. The key novel contributions of this research include using the multivariate delta method to prove that the sampling distributions of the three travel time reliability metrics are asymptotically normal. The asymptotic standard error for the three reliability metrics is derived. The asymptotic normality and the standard error result are used to arrive …

Data From: Statistical Inference For Multimodal Travel Time Reliability, Avinash Unnikrishnan, Miguel Figliozzi, Subhash C. Kochar

TREC Datasets and Databases

Travel time reliability is a key metric of interest to practitioners and researchers because it affects travel choice and the economic competitiveness of urban areas. This research focuses on three travel time reliability metrics – buffer index, modified buffer index, and the relative width of travel time distributions. The key novel contributions of this research include using the multivariate delta method to prove that the sampling distributions of the three travel time reliability metrics are asymptotically normal. The asymptotic standard error for the three reliability metrics is derived. The asymptotic normality and the standard error result are used to arrive …

Data-Driven Mobility Strategies For Multimodal Transportation, Yao-Jan Wu, Xianfeng Terry Yang, Sirisha Kothuri, Abolfazl Karimpour, Qinzheng Wang, Jason Anderson

TREC Final Reports

Multimodal transportation systems (e.g., walking, cycling, automobile, public transit, etc.) are effective in increasing people’s travel flexibility, reducing congestion, and improving safety. Therefore, it is critical to understand what factors would affect people’s mode choices. With advanced technology, such as connected and automated vehicles, cities are now facing a transition from traditional urban planning to developing smart cities. To support multimodal transportation management, this study will serve as a bridge to connect speed management strategies of conventional corridors to connected vehicle corridors. This study consists of three main components. In the first component, the impact of speed management strategies along …

Applying Data-Driven Multimodal Speed Management Strategies For Safe, Efficient Transportation, Yao-Jan Wu, Xianfeng Yeng, Sirisha Kothuri

TREC Project Briefs

How can we use a variety of data-driven speed management strategies to make transportation safer and more efficient for all modes–whether you’re driving, walking or taking transit? The project was led by Yao Jan Wu, director of the Smart Transportation Lab at the University of Arizona. Co-investigators were Xianfeng Terry Yang of the University of Utah, who researches traffic operations and modeling along with connected automated vehicles, and Sirisha Kothuri of Portland State University, whose research has focused on improving signal timing to better serve pedestrians. “We want to improve mobility for all users, be it pedestrians, vehicle drivers or …

Bicycle Planning Gis Tool, Joseph Broach

TREC Final Reports

Although currently only about one percent of US trips are done by bicycle, there is significant geographic variation. Differences across communities, along with much higher cycling rates observed in other places around the world, indicates large potential bicycling demand for daily travel in the US. In response, many communities are developing and implementing bicycle master plans that include a range of bikeway infrastructure aimed at making riding more appealing, including separated paths, protected (or separated) bike lanes, striped bike lanes, bicycle boulevards, sharrows, route signage, and intersection crossing aids. Given limited resources, planners and engineers need tools to estimate the …

Leveraging Twitter And Machine Learning For Real-Time Transit Network Evaluation, Xiaoyue Cathy Liu, Qian Zuo, Shenruoyang Na, Ran Wei, Aaron Golub, Liming Wang, Jake Davis

TREC Project Briefs

With today’s profusion of open data sources and real-time feeds, transit agencies have an unparalleled opportunity to leverage large amounts of data to improve transit service. Thanks to NITC researchers, there is now an open-source tool for that.

The new Social-Transportation Analytic Toolbox (STAT) for Transit Networks, developed by researchers at the University of Utah and Portland State University, is a dynamic platform that combines Twitter, general transit feed specification (GTFS), and census transportation planning products (CTPP)—in this case, job density data—to help agencies evaluate overall system performance and identify connectivity gaps. It can also act as a decision support …

Exploiting New Data Sources To Quantify Arterial Congestion And Performance Measures At A Regional Scale, Miguel A. Figliozzi, Robert L. Bertini, Travis B. Glick, Nicholas B. Stoll, Wei Feng, Bobjot S. Sidhu, Anurag Pande

TREC Final Reports

Transit travel time, operating speed and reliability all influence service attractiveness, operating cost and system efficiency. These metrics have a long-term impact on system effectiveness through a change in ridership. As part of its bus dispatch system (BDS), the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (TriMet) has been archiving automatic vehicle location (AVL) and automatic passenger count (APC) data for all bus trips at the stop level since 1997. In 2014, a new and higher-resolution bus AVL data collection system was fully implemented.

This new AVL system provides stop-level data as well as five-second resolution (5-SR) bus position data between …

Utilizing Egocentric Video And Sensors To Conduct Naturalistic Bicycling Studies, Feng Liu, Miguel A. Figliozzi

TREC Final Reports

Existing data collection methods are mostly designed for videos captured by stationary cameras and are not designed to follow cyclists along a route or to integrate other sensor data. The goals of this research are: a) to develop a platform to collect naturalistic video bicycling data, b) to develop a methodology to integrate video data with other sensors that measure cyclists’ position and comfort levels, and c) to apply the platform and data collection methodology to a real-world route. This research effort has successfully integrated video and sensor data to describe cyclists’ comfort levels along a route. It was found …

Connecting People To Places: Spatiotemporal Analysis Of Transit Supply Using Travel-Time Cubes, Steven Farber

TREC Final Reports

Despite its importance, temporal measures of accessibility are rarely used in transit research or practice. This is primarily due to the inherent difficulty and complexity in computing time-based accessibility metrics. Estimating origin-to-destination travel times that include the “last mile” of travel between the transit network and actual start and endpoints of the trip is technically difficult. Not only do such estimations require multimodal network structures, they also require detailed knowledge of transit schedules and sophisticated algorithms for calculating shortest paths using such inputs. Recently, new standards for sharing transit schedules and geographic data, namely the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) …

Influence Of Road Cross Section On Access Spacing, Karen K. Dixon, Yanfen Zhou, J. L. Gattis

TREC Final Reports

This report presents a study on the influences of select cross-sectional-related design elements (specifically median configurations and bicycle lanes) and their impact on crash severity and type, as well as the associated driver gap acceptance for turning maneuvers at midblock driveway locations on urban arterials. The primary goal of this proposed research is to better understand how the median and bicycle lane configurations can influence safety and operations at driveway locations. The research team utilized crash data, traffic data, and roadway information from driveway locations in the U.S. states of Oregon, Arkansas and Oklahoma. The project team supplemented the data …

Multimodal Data At Signalized Intersections: Strategies For Archiving Existing And New Data Streams To Support Operations And Planning & Fusion And Integration Of Arterial Performance Data, Kristin A. Tufte, Christopher M. Monsere, Sirisha Murthy Kothuri, Carl Scott Olson

TREC Final Reports

There is a growing interest in arterial system management due to the increasing amount of travel on arterials and a growing emphasis on multimodal transportation. The benefits of archiving arterial-related data are numerous. This research report describes our efforts to assemble and develop a multimodal archive for the Portland-Vancouver region. There is coverage of data sources from all modes in the metropolitan region; however, the preliminary nature of the archiving process means that some of the data are incomplete and samples. The arterial data sources available in the Portland-Vancouver region and that are covered in this report include data for …

Pushing Pedalers: What Drives Bicycling?, Jennifer Dill, John Gliebe

TREC Project Briefs

Using a bicycle instead of a motor vehicle for a portion of regular travel could increase people’s physical activity and help improve the nation’s health. Over 60% of personal trips are five miles or less – a reasonable distance to ride a bike – and nearly 40% are two miles or less. Yet current rates of bicycling for transportation are very low, despite the popularity of recreational cycling. Given the potential of bicycling as a means of everyday travel, why aren’t more people cycling? Very little information has been available on the relationship between different types of infrastructure, such as …

Developing Corridor-Level Truck Travel Time Estimates And Other Freight Performance Measures From Archived Its Data, Christopher M. Monsere, Michael Wolfe, Heba Alawakiel, Max Taylor Stephens

TREC Final Reports

The objectives of this research were to retrospectively study the feasibility for using truck transponder data to produce freight corridor performance measures (travel times) and real-time traveler information. To support this analysis, weigh-in-motion data from each of the twenty-two stations in Oregon were assembled, processed, and uploaded in the WIM data archive is housed under the Portland Transportation Archive Listing (PORTAL) umbrella at Portland State University’s Intelligent Transportation Systems Lab. Nearly 42,000,000 truck records were successful uploaded to the archive dating back to July 2005. Two separate algorithms necessary for this research were scripted, tested, and validated. The closest stations …

Understanding And Measuring Bicycling Behavior: A Focus On Travel Time And Route Choice, Jennifer Dill, John Gliebe

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

With rates of obesity, heart disease, and related health problems increasing in the U.S. many policy makers are looking for ways to increase physical activity in everyday life. Using a bicycle instead of a motor vehicle for a portion of everyday travel could help address these problems. This research aims to fill a gap in the existing literature on the effect of different types of infrastructure, such as bicycle lanes or paths, on bicycling. The project used global positioning system (GPS) technology to record where a sample of 164 adults in the Portland, OR region rode their bicycles. Data was …

The Effects Of Roadway Capacity On Peak Narrowing - Evidence From 1995 Npts, Jihong Zhang, Anthony M. Rufolo, Kenneth Dueker, James G. Strathman

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Spreading of the peak is one effect of increased peak-period congestion. Due to peak spreading, the travel-time impact of congestion is mitigated for some travelers, but the inconvenience of traveling at a less-preferred time also has a cost. Alternatively, increases in capacity have their impacts on peak-period congestion mitigated by a narrowing of the peak. This reduces the travel-time savings, but it generates a benefit for those traveling closer to their preferred times. This benefit from capacity improvements has largely been ignored, and one reason is the difficulty of quantifying the effect. This paper reports on some crude attempts to …

Cost Effectiveness Of Articulated Buses When Passenger Time Is Treated As A Cost, Anthony M. Rufolo

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

As the difference between fares and costs has increased over time, transit agencies have searched for ways to cut the cost of service. One method that is now being tried by some transit properties these buses there is a is the use of articulated buses. The larger size of allows one driver to serve more passengers. Thus, trade-off between higher capital costs for the bus and lower labor costs per passenger mile in operation. Hence, the use of the articulated bus appears to be a move toward greater labor productivity by increasing the capital-intensiveness of transit.

The conclusion that articulated …