Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Kennedy, 60 Minutes, And Roger Rabbit: Understanding Conspiracy-Theory Explanations Of The Decline Of Urban Mass Transit, Martha J. Bianco

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper will review the history of the GM Conspiracy Myth, as well as what legal theorists refer to as "the facts in the case." The legal explanation of what really happened goes only so far, though. The whole story about the decline of mass transit in the U.S. is a story about the failure of public policy and about conflict among competing constituencies in the transportation policy process. This paper will very briefly discuss this failure and this conflict and will then conclude with a consideration of - or at least a hypothesis for - the endurance of the …

The Politics Of Implementation: Oregon's Statewide Transportation Planning Rule - What's Been Accomplished, Martha J. Bianco, Sy Adler

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper is a case study of the evolution of Oregon’s groundbreaking Transportation Planning Rule, from its adoption in 1991, up through present amendments. Our analysis is an assessment of how private- and public-sector investors grapple with the coproduction of the built environment under the constraints of a value system that emanates from the state, shepherded by litigious public interest groups. In this case, this value system is articulated in the Oregon administrative rule known as the Transportation Planning Rule. This Rule emphasizes a reduction in the reliance on automobiles and, among other things, requires a decrease in vehicle miles …

The Impact Of Congestion Pricing And Parking Taxes On Spatial Competition, Anthony M. Rufolo, Martha J. Bianco

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Policymakers seeking to reduce reliance on single-occupant automobiles are giving serious consideration to methods to price roads during periods of congest ion and to increase the cost of parking. Such policies are intended to induce increases in carpooling and in the use of mass transit; however, they may have unintended consequences that counteract these goals in the long run. In particular, actual implementation of such policies may create differential price increases that affect the spatial competition for markets between firms located in the central city and those in the suburbs. Analyzing such policies using the spatial competition models of location …

The Connection Between Public Transit And Employment, Thomas W. Sanchez

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Even with a considerable amount of attention being paid to the role of public transportation in addressing inner-city mobility problems, there is very little evidence of the degree to which one affects the other. In other words, little research has specifically focused on how labor participation is impacted by increases in public transportation availability. Research on the spatial mismatch hypothesis has dealt with the relationship between labor participation and the spatial separation of jobs and houses; however, most analyses concentrate on commuting time or distance as a function of auto accessibility. Few, if any, studies have considered the relative impacts …

Marketing Central City Residence To An Aging Baby Boom: The Transportation Angle, Daphne Spain, Thomas W. Sanchez

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper proposes that the aging baby boom will contribute significantly to transportation problems in the future because 1) current land use patterns necessitate dependence on cars; and 2) aging baby boom women will drive more than elderly women do now. Policies that promote central city residence by stressing the transportation advantages of high-density living, therefore, should have particular appeal to baby boom women seeking prolonged independence. Such policies would also serve the interests of localities by reducing traffic congestion, pollution, and further sprawl. We suggest that a combination of direct and indirect housing policies comparable to those that financed …

Validation Of Waimss Incident Duration Estimation Model, Wei Wu, Pushkin Kachroo, Kaan Ozbay

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

This paper presents an effort to validate the traffic incident duration estimation model of WAIMSS (wide area incident management support system). Duration estimation model of WAIMSS predicts the incident duration based on an estimation tree which was calibrated using incident data collected in Northern Virginia. Due to the limited sample size, a full scale test of the distribution, mean and variance of incident duration was performed only for the root node of the estimation tree, white only mean tests were executed at all other nodes whenever a data subset was available. Further studies were also conducted on the model error …

Wide-Area Incident Management System On The Internet, Kaan Ozbay, Pushkin Kachroo

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

The incident management process consists of four sequential steps-incident detection, response, clearance and recovery. Each of these components comprises of a number of operations and coordinated decision-making between the agencies involved. The provision of computer based support tools for the personnel involved will help develop appropriate strategies and increase efficiency and expediency. Existing systems are developed on various traditional computing platforms. However, with the advent of World Wide Web and Internet based programming tools such as Java, it is now possible to develop platform independent decision support tools for the incident management agencies. Any agency will be able to use …

The Oregon Dot Slow-Speed Weigh-In--Motion (Swim) Project: Final Report, James G. Strathman

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Weigh-in-motion (WIM) systems have provided an effective means of data collection for pavement research and facility design, traffic monitoring, and weight enforcement for over 40 years. In weight enforcement, WIM systems have been increasingly used to screen potentially overweight vehicles. Vehicles that exceed weight limits as measured on a WIM scale are then weighed on a static scale, which is subject to accuracy standards specified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (1998). The use of WIM for screening purposes reduces queuing at weigh stations, resulting in considerable savings for both truckers and enforcement agencies. To date, however, WIM …

A Gis Methodology For Assessing The Growth Impacts Of Highway Improvements, Thomas W. Sanchez, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

This paper presents a methodology to assess the induced land use effects of state highway improvements on urban development patterns. The methodology is applied to the case study City of Hillsboro, Oregon and illustrates a framework for data management and analysis. A set of temporal land use characteristics and spatial measures are used as predictors of urban development activities resulting from highway accessibility improvements. A multiple regression analysis tests the significance of these variables in predicting rates and locations of urban development. The primary objective of this research is to identify the relationship between capacity increasing highway improvements and changes …

Household Travel/Activity Decisions: Who Wants To Travel?, Catherine T. Lawson

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Researchers are using activity-based survey data to better understand the nature of the derived demand for travel. However, a strong theoretical construct for derived demand has yet to be developed. In order to understand the ramifications of considering travel as a derived demand, it is necessary to review some of the basic tenets of economics.

Some activities require travel (i.e. shopping or picking up children from daycare), while others are conducted entirely within the confines of the home. There is a set of activities that can be conducted either in or out of the home. A need to travel arises …

Automated Bus Dispatching, Operations, Control, And Service Reliability: Baseline Analysis, James G. Strathman, Kenneth Dueker, Thomas J. Kimpel, Rick Gerhart, Ken Turner, Pete Taylor, Steve Callas, David Griffin, Janet Hopper

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

The authors of this report are engaged in a long term project to assess the impacts of Tri-Met's BDS on service reliability and transit use. The framework designed for this assessment focuses on documenting service reliability and passenger activity at three major junctures:

• The pre-operational (baseline) period;

• The initial (passive) period following implementation of the new system, when both drivers and dispatchers have access to schedule adherence information in real time, but before the development and use of operations control practices that exploit the information generated by the system;

• Full implementation, when operations control practices are defined …

Effects Of Light Rail Transit In Portland: Implications For Transit-Oriented Development Design Concepts, Kenneth Dueker, Martha J. Bianco

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

In the Portland, Oregon, region many local planners have embraced the neotraditional planning concept in the form of transit-oriented development (TOD). One of the primary components of transit-oriented development, light rail transit (LRT), has been in place in Portland long enough to provide data for analysis. Because neotraditional planners often emphasize LRT as a crucial element in decreasing auto use and in encouraging high-density development, this paper examines the effects of LRT in the Portland region including mode share, density, and property values. The empirical analysis provides evidence that light rail alone has not been sufficient to have an appreciable …

Orbit: The Oregon Road Base Information Team, A Draft Summary Report, Mark Bosworth, Kenneth Dueker, Philip J. Wuest

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

It is clear that transportation organizations across the nation are integrating GIS into operations at many different levels—from day to day use for data display, to full-scale enterprise level integration for operations, inventory management, research and a variety of other purposes. The cost of building and maintaining a current and accurate GIS database can be substantial within any given organization. For some smaller level organizations—small counties, cities or special districts, the cost of gathering data, organizing it and implementing systems within expensive software on an expensive operating platform can be downright discouraging. Also, as more complex data structures are accumulated …

Transit Time Internet Access, Janet Vorvick, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Transit Time Internet Access (TTIA) is a World Wide Web (WWW) application which delivers real-time bus schedule information to users of the Internet. TTIA allows a bus rider to request and receive schedule deviation information about a specific bus at a specific timepoint. This report explains the design of TTIA, the specifics of the implementation, the issues of scope, the problems that were encountered and some conclusions.

Providence Place: The Development Of A Downtown Mall, Center For Economic Development

Center for Economic Development Technical Reports

This study examines the history of urban mall development in the United States and the role of such sites in widespread revitalization efforts that are intended to protect the city from further decline and bring it back to its once thriving existence, before the mass relocations to the suburbs.

Providence Place in downtown Providence, Rhode Island is the primary focus of the study which has three objectives. The first objective is to analyze the development patterns of suburban malls in the Providence region. The second is to identify the economic factors that prompted the development of a large scale downtown …

A Proposed Method Of Transportation Feature Identification, J. Allison Butler, Kenneth Dueker

Center for Urban Studies Publications and Reports

Geographic information systems (GIS) are being increasingly deployed by transportation agencies to help them display, review, and utilize data. The primary items of interest are transportation facilities and services, which may take the form of highways, airports, bus routes, and seaports, among others. Using GIS software, transportation facilities are represented as geometric shapes; i.e., points, lines, and areas. However, it is increasingly apparent to GIS users in the field of transportation that a geometry-based approach is not sufficient.

The offered solution is to develop a feature-based GIS approach for transportation. The central requirement of such an approach is to have …