Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Rideshare Practices In Developing Countries Vs Developed Countries, Francis Wambalaba

PSU Transportation Seminars

This project investigated strategies towards development, marketing and implementation of employer programs for reducing single occupancy vehicles to mitigate traffic congestion. It was guided by the following research questions: which socio-economic factors influence carpooling; how do environmental factors influence carpooling; and what are effective traffic management strategies for enhancing carpooling. The presentation will also strive to introduce the US context for purposes of perspective.

Why Your City Needs A Car Master Plan, Cathy Tuttle

PSU Transportation Seminars

In 2022, cars are ubiquitous and completely embedded into America’s economy and social fabric. American cities don’t make car plans, but all transportation plans – whether they are for people who walk, bike, take transit, run freight or delivery businesses – are all written in response to cars. Transportation planning is all about cars; supporting cars or constraining cars. How did our cities evolve into places where cars dominate, and where can we go from here? To move to a new paradigm, cities need to acknowledge car dominance and focus on cars with the same rigor they do other modal …

Next Steps For Portland’S Neighborhood Greenways, Scott Cohen

PSU Transportation Seminars

Portland's neighborhood greenways are a key component of the city's transportation system and future. Join PBOT's new neighborhood greenway coordinator to learn how this facility type developed, near-term plans for improvements, and what the future holds for these unique bikeways.

Participants will gain a better understanding of:

• The history of Portland's neighborhood greenways
• PBOT's evaluation process for the neighborhood greenway system
• Where the system is thriving and where PBOT sees deficiencies
• How PBOT plans to address the system's development over the next three to five years

Webinar: Contextual Guidance At Intersections For Protected Bicycle Lanes, Christopher Monsere, Nathan Mcneil

TREC Webinar Series

Separated bike lanes have become increasingly common around the United States as cities seek to attract the new riders, including people who want to ride but limit their riding because they do not feel comfortable riding with motor vehicle traffic. Planners and engineers are working to identify contextually appropriate, safe, and comfortable designs for intersection locations, where bicyclist paths cross the paths of turning vehicles as well as cross-traffic. This research employed a combination of user surveys and simulations to anticipate expected bicyclist and turning vehicle interactions and bicyclist comfort based on design type and volumes. Findings examine which types …

Our Young People And The Gateway To Opportunity, Jonnie Ling

PSU Transportation Seminars

The Community Cycling Center has been working with youth through the "Big Jump: Gateway to Opportunity" project. We'll be discussing our exploratory educational model and the ways the project can increase accessibility and opportunity for the youth living and learning in the Gateway neighborhoods.

The Success Of An Integrated Mobility Strategy: Lessons From The Netherlands For The Pacific West Coast, Lucas Van Der Linde

PSU Transportation Seminars

The Netherlands sets the standard for their multimodal connectivity. It has world's highest use of cycling and an integrated mobility network with an efficient transport system. During this seminar, Lucas will tell more about the Dutch Approach and how this could be applied to the American transportation context.

Lucas will use the case of the Bay area to show this. The Bay Area in California currently faces massive challenges in transportation because of the enormous growth of the region. With the use of a new innovative modelling tool, the Move Meter (http://www.movemeter.com/), Lucas will show the potential of …

New Probe Data Sources To Measure Cycling Behavior And Safety, Christopher Cherry

PSU Transportation Seminars

Emerging probe data sources from smartphones on on-board devices are able to measure behavior of cyclists with very high resolution. From this, for the first time, we are able to measure relatively precise behavior that allows new insights into exposure, route choice, safety behavior, or technology choice. Probe data, merged with other data sources, can begin to develop a more complete picture of cyclists on-road behavior.

This presentation will offer examples of analyses done to investigate cyclists behavior using app-based and on-board GPS data in the context of individual cyclists behavior (i.e., app users) and behavior of bikeshare users (i.e., …

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 …

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 …

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 …

A Pathway Linking Smart Growth Neighborhoods To Home-Based Pedestrian Travel, Steven R. Gehrke, Kelly J. Clifton

PSU Transportation Seminars

Land development patterns, urban design, and transportation system features are inextricably linked to pedestrian travel. Accordingly, planners and decision-makers have turned to integrated transportation-land use policies and investments to address the pressing need for improvements in physical activity levels via the creation of walkable communities. However, policy questions regarding the identification of smart growth indicators and their connection to walking remain unanswered, because most studies of the built environment determinants of pedestrian travel: (a) represent the built environment with isolated metrics instead of as a multidimensional construct and (b) model this transportation-land use relationship outside of a multidirectional analytic framework. …

Measuring Stress Levels For Real-World On-Road Cyclists: Do Bicycle Facilities, Intersections And Traffic Levels Affect Cyclists' Stress?, Álvaro Caviedes

PSU Transportation Seminars

This research effort presents a novel approach to measure cyclists’ stress: real-world, on-road measurements of physiological stress as cyclists travel across different types of bicycle facilities in various traffic volumes. This study addresses the question of how the characteristics of a bicycle trip affect stress levels using physiological data, specifically GSR. As detailed in the next section, GSR-based studies have been successfully employed for many years in the psychological field to recognize and associate emotions and behaviors to physiological responses. The three research questions examined in this study are: i) Does peak traffic impact cyclists’ stress levels? ii) Do intersections …

Peak Pedaling: Has Portland Bicycling Reached The Top Of The Logistic Curve?, Robert Mccullough

PSU Transportation Seminars

The recent City Club report on bicycling provided an opportunity to collect and analyze a number of data sets including the new Hawthorne Bridge data. One question is where Portland bicycling on the logistic curve -- a common tool for judging the maturity of a developing product or activity. Logistic curves are used for marketing, for epidemiology, and even for visits to Indian owned casinos. The preliminary evidence is that we are reaching the horizontal area of the curve. Additional evidence Our further research into future policies indicates a shift to bicycle boulevards in order to attract more risk averse …

Development Of The Idaho Statewide Travel Demand Model Trip Matrices Using Cell Phone Od Data And Origin Destination Matrix Estimation, Ben Stabler

PSU Transportation Seminars

As part of the initial phase of development for the Idaho Statewide Travel Demand Model, Parsons Brinckerhoff developed a base year auto and truck trip matrix using AirSage cell phone OD data, a statewide network in Cube, traffic counts, and origin-destination matrix estimation (ODME) procedures. To begin, the 4000+ statewide zone system was aggregated into a 700 super zone system for collecting the cell phone OD data. Next, the cell phone data was collected for the month of September 2013 for the following market segments: Average weekday resident HBW, HBO, NHB, and visitor NHB trips. The cell phone trips were …

Putting The Fun Before The Wonk: Using Bike Fun To Diversify Bike Ridership, Lillian Karabaic

PSU Transportation Seminars

The Community Cycling Center has been at the business of broadening access to bicycling for 22 years. Far before anyone was talking about "equity" in the world of bike commuting and advocacy, the Community Cycling Center was working directly with youth of color to make biking accessible. How have they been doing it? What have they learned?

Lillian Karabaic explains the secret to the Community Cycling Center's work to build bike capacity in underserved neighborhoods: bike fun. Many bike advocacy organizations look down at making bikes fun because they think it lowers the status of serious transportation to "recreation" or …

Rerouting Mode Choice Models: ​H​Ow Including Realistic Route Options Can Help Us Understand Decisions To Walk Or Bike, Joseph Broach

PSU Transportation Seminars

For a number of reasons—congestion, public health, greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, demographic shifts, and community livability to name a few—the importance of walking and bicycling as transportation options will only continue to increase. Currently, policy interest and infrastructure funding for nonmotorized modes far outstrip our ability to successfully model bike and walk travel. In the past five years, we have learned a lot about where people prefer to bike and walk, but what can that tell us about whether people will bike or walk in the first place? The research presented here is designed to start bridging the gap …

Measuring And Modeling Cyclists’ Comfort And Stress Levels, Miguel Figliozzi

PSU Transportation Seminars

Some researchers have tried to categorize cyclists’ levels of traffic stress utilizing facility or traffic data that can be readily measured in the field, such as motorized travel lanes, travel speeds, and type of bicycle infrastructure.

This seminar will present data and modeling results utilizing two novel data sources:

(a) real-world, on-road measurements of physiological stress as cyclists travel across different types of facilities and

(b) data collected utilizing a smartphone app called ORcycle (http://www.pdx.edu/transportation-lab/orcycle).

This presentation will discuss key findings and potential policy implications.

Towards Effective Design Treatment For Right Turns At Intersections With Bicycle Traffic, David Hurwitz, Christopher Monsere

PSU Transportation Seminars

The overall goal of this research was to quantify the safety performance of alternative traffic control strategies to mitigate right-turning-vehicle/bicycle collisions, often called "right-hook" crashes, at signalized intersections in Oregon.

A two stage experiment was developed in the OSU high-fidelity driving simulator to investigate the causal factors of right-hook crashes at signalized intersections with a striped bike lane and no right-turn lane, and to then identify and evaluate alternative design treatments that could mitigate the occurrence of right-hook crashes.

Experiment 1 investigated motorist and environmental related causal factors of right-hook crashes, using three different motorist performance measures: (1) visual attention, …

An Activity-Related Land Use Mix Construct And Its Connection To Pedestrian Travel, Steven R. Gehrke

PSU Transportation Seminars

Land use mix is a central smart growth principle connected to active transportation. This presentation describes the indicators of local land use mixing and their association with pedestrian travel in Oregon’s Willamette River Valley. It argues that land use mix is a multidimensional construct reflected by the complementarity, composition, and configuration of land use types, which is positively linked to walk mode choice and home-based trip frequency. Findings from this study underline the conceptual and empirical benefit of analyzing this transportation-land use interaction with a landscape pattern measure of activity-related composition and spatial configuration.

The presentation for this seminar was …

Cargo Cycles For Local And Last Mile Delivery: Lessons From New York City, Alison Conway

PSU Transportation Seminars

Cities depend on safe and efficient goods movement to support community livability and a healthy economy. However, delivery of goods in an urban environment presents a tremendous challenge. Traditional motorized vehicles used for goods movement – ranging from cargo vans to box trucks - are inherently incompatible with (1) the multimodal street environments of modern cities, with clean, quiet conditions preferred by residents, and (2) larger environmental sustainability goals. As freight flows continue to grow with the demands of global trade, new urban freight and city logistics solutions are needed.

Cargo cycles – human powered cycles equipped with freight carrying …

Examining The Right To Bicycle: Synergies And Tensions Between Human Rights, Civil Rights, And Planning For Cycling, Aaron Golub

PSU Transportation Seminars

Securing and expanding the broad right to bicycle, including the right to adequate and safe street space and related infrastructure for cycling along with other policies and protections for cyclists, is the obvious goal of cycling advocacy efforts in their various forms. All rights are situated within frameworks for promulgating and insuring they are honored, and the right to cycling is no different. This project investigates how the right to bicycle falls within various rights frameworks, focusing on broad human rights and civil rights frameworks while reflecting as well on traffic safety codes and transportation planning frameworks. While certain aspects …

The Backstory: How Livablestreets Advocates Changed Boston, Jeffrey Rosenblum

PSU Transportation Seminars

Local grassroots advocacy organizations play a critical role in shaping the future of cities but receive very little attention in research, especially insofar as understanding the most effective tactics that should be used by these organizations to achieve their objectives. When LivableStreets Alliance was founded in 2005, The City of Boston had 3/8 of one mile of bicycle lanes. Over the past decade, we have seen a sea change. Boston has published a nationally-recognized Complete Streets Guide, MassDOT has incorporated cycle-track designs into several federally-funded projects, and highway overpasses are slated for removal. What is LivableStreets’ role in shifting policy, …

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.

Evaluating The Level-Of-Service Of Protected Bike Lanes, Nick Foster

PSU Transportation Seminars

Summary: The most recent edition of the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) contains analysis procedures for measuring the level-of-service (LOS), also referred to as quality of service, provided by an urban roadway to bicyclists. The method uses different design and operating features of the roadway segment (e.g. width, motor vehicle volumes and speeds) to assess an LOS grade of A (best) to F (worst). These procedures are used by planners and engineers to recommend how existing streets could be retrofitted or new streets designed to better serve people on bicycles (and other modes). However, the current HCM does not include methods …

Trick Or Treat(Ment)? : Impact Of Route-Level Features On Walk And Bike Decisions, Joseph Broach

PSU Transportation Seminars

Trick or Treatment? Impact of Route-Level Features on Decisions to Walk or Bike Summary: Some travel routes attract people walking and cycling, while others may scare them away. What features of street environments are most important, and how do available routes affect decisions to bike or walk on a specific trip?

Research to date has focused on either large-scale areal measures like "miles of bike lane nearby" or else has considered only shortest path routes. Neither method is suited to capturing the impact of targeted route-level policies like neighborhood greenways. This session will present a new technique for measuring bike …

Seminar #294: Transforming Transportation Through Connectivity, Robert L. Bertini

PSU Transportation Seminars

The transportation system is the backbone of the United States' economy, and transportation is an essential part of everyday life for American citizens. It is essential that the transportation system continue to provide accessibility and connectivity to an ever-evolving global economy. A key way to do so is to embrace, develop and implement new technologies. One of the newest and most promising facets of transportation-related technology is in the field of connected mobility. The vision behind connected mobility is of a transportation system where vehicles, travelers, and infrastructure are all wirelessly connected with one another and able to transmit real-time …

Pedestrian Safety And Culture Change, Ron Van Houten

PSU Transportation Seminars

This session will describe the process and results of a NHTSA study that showed a change in driver culture of yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks on a citywide basis. The research won the Pat Waller award from the National Academy of Sciences, Transportation Research Board in January of this year. The approach to changing road user behavior focused on an integrated approach that include Enforcement, Engineering, and Educational efforts that were designed to be dovetailed together and that included a social norming component. Additional information will be provided on engineering solutions that can facilitate changes in pedestrian level of service …

An Introduction To The Nacto Urban Street Design: Changing The Dna Of City Streets, Peter Koonce

PSU Transportation Seminars

In this seminar Peter will summarize his contributions to the NACTO Urban Street Design Guide, a guidebook focused on a paradigm shift in transportation, pulling away from the traditional bias toward highway designs that do not always meet the complex needs of streets in cities.

Bike Planning Methods In Oregon Communities, Tara Weidner

PSU Transportation Seminars

In this seminar, Tara Weidner will discuss changes in the works to the State Analysis Procedures Manual (APM) to include three graduated levels of bike planning methods for use in Oregon communities, based on community size, data needs, and planning stage. These include the Bike Level of Traffic Stress (BLTS), a sketch tool used to assess bike network connectivity, the data-heavy Highway Capacity Manual Multi-modal Level of Service (MMLOS) procedures, and a simplified MMLOS developed by the same researchers.

Why Doesn't That Traffic Signal Ever Turn Green? An Evaluation Of Roadway Markings For Cyclists, Stefan W. Bussey, Christopher Monsere, Peter Koonce

PSU Transportation Seminars

Signalized intersections often rely on vehicle detection to determine when to give a green light. The 2009 Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) includes an on-pavement marking and curbside sign that public agencies can use to indicate where cyclists should position themselves while waiting at an intersection. This presentation reviews the effectiveness of current markings, signs, and other methods used to help cyclists properly position themselves over detection.