Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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, …

A Simulator-Based Analysis Of Engineering Treatments For Right-Hook Bicycle Crashes At Signalized Intersections, Jennifer Warner, David S. Hurwitz, Christopher M. Monsere, Kayla Fleskes

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A right-hook crash is a crash between a right-turning motor vehicle and an adjacent through-moving bicycle. At signalized intersections, these crashes can occur during any portion of the green interval when conflicting bicycles and vehicles are moving concurrently. The objective of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness of four types of engineering countermeasures – regulatory signage, intersection pavement marking, smaller curb radius, and protected intersection design – at modifying driver behaviors that are known contributing factors in these crashes. This research focused on right-hook crashes that occur during the latter stage of the circular green indication at signalized intersections …

China's Motorization Wave And The Place Of Emerging Technologies, Christopher Cherry

PSU Transportation Seminars

E-bikes, E-Cars, Carshare, Bikeshare, and Micro-EVs in China have shaken up the traditional motorization pathways that have occurred in developing countries in the past. The combination of emerging vehicle technologies, urban and environmental constraints, and heavy-handed policy make China's motorization processes unique in the world—but how China motorizes has far-reaching impacts based on sheer volume of vehicles and population.

This seminar discusses the results of a six-year NSF CAREER project to explore China's motorization processes, combining behavioral and environmental modeling approaches to assess the impacts of emerging vehicle technologies on motorization and ultimately environmental sustainability. The focus is mostly on …

Land Use And Active Travel: A Complex Relationship, Steven R. Gehrke

TREC Project Briefs

While it’s accepted that mixed-use development promotes active travel, researchers don’t have a consensus on exactly how land use determines people’s travel patterns.

Focusing On Equity In Regional Plans, Kristine M. Williams

TREC Project Briefs

Metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) have long been required to consider the equity implications of their regional transportation plans and processes.

Network Congestion Effect Of E-Hailing Transportation Services, Xuegang Ban

PSU Transportation Seminars

E-hailing plays a key role in emerging transportation services such as ridesourcing, ridesharing and taxis, among others. This seminar will present a general economic model to analyze the congestion effect of e-hailing services in a transportation network.

The model can help analyze customers’ choices of different modes, based on their value of time and the charging schemes of different services, as well as the overall impact of the services to network level congestion.

Peer-To-Peer Carsharing: Short-Term Effects On Travel Behavior In Portland, Or, Jennifer Dill, Nathan Mcneil, Steven Howland

TREC Final Reports

Peer-to-peer (P2P) carsharing is a relatively new concept in the U.S. Enabled by recent internet and mobile technology development, P2P carsharing generally involves a facilitating company connecting private vehicle owners to people who are interested in renting a vehicle. P2P carsharing has many things in common with business-to-consumer (B2C) carsharing services. Consumers join the service to rent vehicles on a short-term basis from locations dispersed throughout a certain area. Both services may allow households to reduce their private car ownership. However, P2P carsharing differs substantially from other models in that there are two distinct sets of consumers: those who rent …

Evaluating The Distributional Effects Of Regional Transportation Plans And Projects, Kristine Williams, Aaron Golub

TREC Final Reports

Metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) have long been required to consider the equity implications of their regional transportation plans and processes. Funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities, this research aims to provide additional guidance to MPOs on how to evaluate distributional equity in regional plans and projects. The report begins with an overview of federal requirements related to equity in transportation planning. We then synthesize contemporary methods for measuring transportation equity and the distributional effects of plans and projects from a review of the literature and MPO plans and studies. The report concludes with exploratory case studies of …

Narratives Of Marginalized Cyclists: Understanding Obstacles To Utilitarian Cycling Among Women And Minorities In Portland, Or, Amy Lubitow

TREC Final Reports

Research has demonstrated that everyday or utilitarian forms of cycling are most likely to generate positive population-level health impacts (Garrard et al., 2012), yet significant deterrents to routine cycling remain, particularly for women and minorities. The primary aim of this project was to conduct a qualitative interview study that generated rich, narrative data regarding obstacles to routine or utilitarian cycling for women and minorities who already see biking as a viable form of transit, but who make relatively few bike trips. A secondary aim of the project was to develop a set of specific interventions that have the potential to …

Getting To Know The Data: Understanding Assumptions, Sensitivities, Uncertainty, And Being "Conservative" While Using Ite's Trip Generation Data In The Land Development Process, Kristina Marie Currans

PSU Transportation Seminars

Many agencies rely on trip generation estimates to evaluate the transportation impacts of land development in urban and suburban areas alike. Over the past decade, substantial attention has been paid to one national set of guidelines—the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Trip Generation Handbook (2014) and corresponding Manual (2012)—focusing in particular to improve the use of these data and supplementary methods for urban contexts.

The purpose of this study is to explore the typical data provided in the Handbook, within the context of these new improved state-of-the-art methods. As ITE’s describes, “an example of poor professional judgment is to rely …

Design For An Aging Population, Trygve Faste, Kiersten Muenchinger

TREC Final Reports

Older Americans are increasing in numbers and addressing their needs through better public transportation design will improve their quality of life. This study sought to increase understanding of the obstacles faced by people with impairments in vision, hearing and/or mobility, which are common issues for older people, and generate physical product solutions. The research was conducted to conceptualize products, structures and services to reduce or eliminate these obstacles.

With a focus on the Eugene, OR, public bus system, elderly riders were surveyed and interviewed. Designers rode on buses noting what worked well and where problems arose. Five ride-along observations of …

Addressing Data Challenges For Bicycle Crash Analysis, Eleni Christofa

PSU Transportation Seminars

Although an increasing number of separated bicycle facilities have been appearing across the US over the last few years, the majority of bicyclists are still traveling on roadways shared with motorized vehicles.

As a result, bicycles are essentially double exposed to safety risk, due to their interactions with both motorized vehicles and other bicycles. In addition to this double exposure, data challenges–such as a lack of continuous counts and bicycle crash data—complicate the assessment of bicycle safety further.

This research presents a bicycle crash analysis framework for estimating bicycle crash rates accounting for both bicycle and motorized vehicle exposure as …

Big Data And The Future Of Travel Modeling, Greg Macfarlane

PSU Transportation Seminars

New technologies such as smart phones and web applications constantly collect data on individuals' trip-making and travel patterns. Efforts at using these "Big data" products, to date, have focused on using them to expand or inform traditional travel demand modeling frameworks; however, it is worth considering if a new framework built to maximize the strengths of big data would be more useful to policy makers and planners.

In this presentation Greg Macfarlane will present a discussion on elements of travel models that could quickly benefit from big data and concurrent machine learning techniques, and results from a preliminary application of …

Exploring The Positive Utility Of Travel And Mode Choice, Patrick Allen Singleton

PSU Transportation Seminars

Why do people travel? We traditionally assume traveling is a means to an end, travel demand is derived (from the demand for activities), and travel time is to be minimized. Recently, scholars have questioned these axioms, noting that some people may like to travel, use travel time productively, enjoy the experience of traveling, or travel for non-utilitarian reasons. The idea that travel can provide benefits and may be motivated by factors beyond reaching activity destinations is known as “the positive utility of travel” or PUT.

This study presents a conceptual and empirical look at the positive utility of travel and …

Webinar: Integrating Explicit And Implicit Methods In Travel Behavior Research: A Study Of Driver Attitudes And Bias, Tara Goddard

TREC Webinar Series

Car crashes are still a leading cause of death in the United States, with vulnerable road users like bicyclists and pedestrians being injured or killed at rates that outpace their mode share.

Planners, engineers, and advocates are increasingly adopting Vision Zero and Tactical Urbanism approaches and trying to better understand the underlying causes of dangerous roadway interactions. However, existing research into crash causation has focused on instrumental factors (e.g. intersection type, vehicle speed) while little research has probed the role of attitudes or socio-cognitive mechanisms in interactions between roadway users.

Social psychology suggests that attitudes and social cognitions can play …

Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps To Model Policy Issues In The Face Of Uncertainty And Limited Data, Brian Gregor

PSU Transportation Seminars

Planners and policymakers are often faced with the need to make decisions about issues for which there is uncertainty and limited data. For example, transportation planners are now faced with the prospect that new transportation technologies such as autonomous vehicles could greatly alter future transportation system needs. Decisions about these types of issues are difficult to reason about and consequently are likely to be ignored or made on the basis of simplistic logic. Although modeling could be helpful, especially for issues involving complex systems, it is rarely used because models usually require large amounts of data and and handle uncertainty …

Estimating Reliability Indices And Confidence Intervals For Transit And Traffic At The Corridor Level, Travis B. Glick

PSU Transportation Seminars

As congestion worsens, the importance of rigorous methodologies to estimate travel-time reliability increases. Exploiting fine-granularity transit GPS data, this research proposes a novel method to estimate travel-time percentiles and confidence intervals. Novel transit reliability measures based on travel-time percentiles are proposed to identify and rank low-performance hotspots; the proposed reliability measures can be utilized to distinguish peak-hour low performance from whole-day low performance. As a case study, the methodology is applied to a bus transit corridor in Portland, Oregon. Time-space speed profiles, heatmaps, and visualizations are employed to highlight sections and intersections with high travel-time variability and transit low performance. …

Avoiding Bus Bunching: From Theory To Practice, Ricardo Giesen

PSU Transportation Seminars

The problem of bus bunching in a high frequency service has been largely studied in the literature.

This phenomenon is produced by three main factors

(i) the variability in travel time between stops; (ii) variations in passenger demand; and (iii) drivers’ heterogeneity.

In order to tackle this phenomenon a wide range of control strategies have been proposed, however, none of them had been successfully implemented on a large transit network with high frequency services.

In this talk, we present a control scheme based on a rolling horizon optimization problem that has been successfully implemented for real-time control of two high …

Improving Walkability Through Control Strategies At Signalized Intersections, Sirisha Murthy Kothuri, Andrew Kading, Edward J. Smaglik, Christopher Sobie

TREC Final Reports

As cities and communities nationwide seek to develop Complete Streets that foster livability and accommodate all modes, signal timing control strategies that include pedestrians in the operational decision process are gaining importance. This research tested several efficiency-focused pedestrian treatments – coordination, actuated-coordination, free operation, short cycle lengths – and safety-focused treatment including leading pedestrian intervals and Barnes Dance. Using a software-in-the-loop simulation, the operational impacts of these treatments on all users (vehicles, heavy vehicles, bicyclists and pedestrians) at an intersection were evaluated. Results showed that among the efficiency-based treatments, free operation was most beneficial for reducing minor-street pedestrian delays. Both …